Field Independence

Hey Bethany,
Thanks for the reply and good thoughts.

I have spent some time in this area before, but not using those specific terms. This is talking about learning at a “deep” level, I think.

For example, it appears that “thinking” animals, such as humans, progress through field independence toward field dependence as they gain higher education, or more specialized skills and experience. It seems to me that this is analogous to the adaptation of organisms to their environment, and is one of the reasons for both human progress though optimal adjustment and for senescence.

As we become better and better adapted to a specific environment and it’s “time snapshot”, we become more and more capable of “mastering” that environment. We grow into it in many ways. We grok the zeitgeist, among other things.

However, time waits for no man. Or other being. After a period of time the environment has changed enough that what was formerly optimal adjustment is no longer so.

It is necessary to “refresh” the generations to re-do the adjustment process to the new environment to obtain optimal fit and finish. Only that which grows up into the new environment can be optimally adjusted to it. The older optimally adjusted are now obsolete, and their mass and protoplasm must be recycled.

Or so I have thought. Now you introduce the possibility of field independence, which might hold out hope for those who can recycle their adaptation without a generational do over.

Will we accumulate so many data sets from our increasing abilities to store the products of our extensions. ie media, that there will be no advantage to starting over from biological scratch? Has our environment taken on characteristics that now make senescence itself obsolete?

Kind of don’t think so, but it’s at least a little bit intriguing…

And I’ve been wondering a lot about the way we learn things that are less rationally organized, and more intuitive and “creative”. We have disagreed somewhat on “creative” learning before, with you positing that it’s a recombination of previously existing knowledge, or elements, and me saying that it’s a newly birthed thing out of some combination of mind, environment, and that mystical space of being that Jung called the collective unconscious. To be roughly approximate of our expressed opinions.

Not to sound too crazy, but for all that I respect rationality, my experience leads me to believe that the mind has many ways that cannot be accounted for by rational analysis at present. Even rational analysis eventually leads back upon itself, the snake eating it’s tale. Have to make room somehow for that uncomfortable realization that we see only through the glass darkly. Reality not for sissies…

I forgot that from the beginning you have said you like to have these kinds of speculative conversations. Me too.

Do you still work on your own car?

John

Leadership

Julia,
Had an interesting conversation today with my friend and colleague Gary Gomes.
We have been involved in various initiatives re broadband regionally, and with the High Tech Consortium. Among other things.

We were dancing around the question of what makes online community work, and what makes a volunteer organization work. I was talking about all the parts of people that are involved in those endeavors, and what is it that distinguishes a successful online community or offline community from those that don’t succeed. (In a perfect universe, I’d take your online community class again this fall…)

Are people there for the social interactions, are they there to be a part of something meaningful, are they there to learn, are they there to make connections, are they there because it’s something others are doing, were they attracted by good marketing, or a good idea, or by their friends etc etc. And what keeps them involved and what makes the community thrive and grow? What is the “value” for the participants?

Gary brought his background in business organizations into the conversation….saying that it’s not just the paycheck that stimulates people to really bring their full contribution to an organization. Someone needs to provide “leadership”…

And I keep asking myself what you have or did that made the community part of Cel460 work pretty well. My answer has something to do with your personal involvement, your caring for the students, and a kind of implied leadership by example, and by supporting others. Which I think, among your capabilities, clearly stands out.

And thinking about that reminded me of a teacher you had, and told me about, that was a great example of this hard to quantify or define quality. I think perhaps he wrote something on leadership? My memory isn’t quite retrieving that data for me.

I would hazard a guess that leadership comes from somewhere…some people have it…how did they “get it”? I would also assume that in the end, as with most things good about life, it comes down to some form of faith.

I pass these thoughts on because I think we are trying to work on some of the same problems in online community and social networking, and because I value your thoughts.

John

Keeping online hope alive

Mike,

There’s always another side to the story isn’t there.
Or a long list of “other sides”…thanks for sharing yours.
Your viewpoint is informed, thought out, and appreciated.

As you correctly point out, a lot of this is a matter of commerce, and the vicissitudes thereof. And who knows who wins when the dinosaurs take to the field. It usually isn’t us, although occasionally things work out for the best by accident.

When it comes to a battle of the big guys and the little guys, the little guys better keep their wits about them or they will get squished, as you suggest.

Is this deja vu or the sixties all over again?

But assuming one can avoid ending up being the slow members of the herd that get picked off by the beasts of prey, and one remains a vibrant willing participant in what the new can bring…there’s still a slew of issues having to do with personal ethics. Determining what the right thing is…

I’ve had some experience in promoting the new world of online community, and one hears a lot of concern about privacy and security. I know the concerns are real, and any utopia attracts those who would destroy it…and afterall we are dealing with the human animal and just how much can we really “trust” each other…right? How safe is safe? And is there really any limit to fear?

But still, somewhere in here, I’m trying to promote openess over fear, as in general being the preferred state of human existence. Online community thrives on the feeling of security, but also the feeling that being open, being real, being frank, being oneself, can be tremendously rewarding. There’s a bit of a rush of discovering that one can connect with others in ways one previously couldn’t manage to do. Find like souls half way across the world.

And there’s a downside too, I know, but I want to stay with the good vibes…the sunny side of the street…at least long enough to discover what I might be missing.

Keeping hope alive in this brave new world…without naivete, without utopian dreams, without endangering the innocence of all…that’s way beyond me. However, I can decide to take some risks and assume that some of the negatives of personal exposure will be overcome by the positives of new human connections. Or as the case may be, profound or simply exciting learning opportunities.

Oh, and to the degree I can manage to control my brash tendencies, keep my head safe, though I tend to be a bit reckless in that life skill.

John

Doing the copyright thing Giving Credit, Permissions, Legalities,

Kati,

I appreciated your discussion on copyright issues for “borrowed” images on a website.

As technology advances often get ahead of settled law, grey areas open up, and uncertainties abound, and even a frontier lawlessness can become the norm.

This has it’s pluses and minuses. On the one hand, if we had to wait for the law to catch up or get out in front of innovation, change would be stifled. Often a period of experimentation is needed to sort out what works and what doesn’t in the “brave new world”.

And on the other hand, eventually civilization requires a codification of norms for “things to work”. Even then, these codes are often problematic in their enforcement, and in the different attitudes persons may have in public observance versus private practice.

In this case, I’m wondering how much “borrowing” and “repurposing of content” is going to be considered just part of Web2.0 common practice, and what is going to shake out as “really illegal”. And what the attitudes of people will be in practice as opposed to in theory.

I’m conflicted on this, but tend to support that which allows online communication to thrive best. Which probably means asking forgiveness rather than permission…in real world terms. But I also know that really doesn’t work for every situation or circumstance either….so no, I don’t have the answer.

I borrowed Ryan’s vocal that you created, and tried to give him some credit, but I didn’t have permission from either of you. Was this a good thing, using the power of the internet to share his creation in a new way, or was it a bad thing because the use was not approved beforehand?

I probably wouldn’t have done it if I had to bring up the question of permissions beforehand, just because of the extra effort involved. In this case, I haven’t put it into the public domain, it’s still in private places. Does that change anything? I dunno, but it was fun to do, and made me happy, and I hoped would make others happy too. You could be unhappy about it, and that wouldn’t be good. Or maybe you would have been happy to grant permission, but would have wanted me to ask first. Or maybe it’s not a big deal…

And I could ask myself, how would I like it if it was “done to” me…my tutorial videos mashed into something? Would I think that was fun, or a problem? I don’t know the answer there either. Part of me thinks privacy as we used to know it is being reinvented to work with the new “connectivity” of online community. And maybe we don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like yet. I want online community to thrive, and if people are very afraid of privacy issues, that isn’t going to happen.

I’m going to post this on my blog, because I still need to think about these things a lot more…

John

Privacy paradox

JimmyDon,

Forget to mention that this privacy thing seems to be a paradox for online community….because without self disclosure, community and connection are lacking the basis for growth…but how does one create the conditions for “private and secure” when openness is what’s needed?

This is a very practical pragmatic question. There’s an organization in LC that needs to grow by developing online community to the point that people are motivated to participate and work hard on volunteer activities. But the “target demographic” is probably very concerned about privacy issues, and even the organization is very concerned about hanging on to proprietary value.

The glimmer of an answer here for me, is that we need to get adjusted to a different level of privacy than what we used to have. On one level, if there’s so much information out there, after a while, no one has the time to really pay that much attention…so it’s there, but people are going to be bored with it, or at least lazy about paying attention to what we post on our profiles…or the hundreds of pages of stuff we end up “posting” all over the web….or that comes back from a google search…

Got any answers?

John

Brave new online self exposed?

Jimmy Don,

I really like this post about privacy and online community.

I think these are really deep issues…that kind of appear to be just another set of technology adjustments….whereas privacy gets to the heart of “who we are”.

In online environments, who we are is a set of data in a social profile, plus a number of relations to other data sets, such as “online friends” “avatars” predilections for media artifacts…and what sites we are “members” of.

That’s a different way of knowing thyself in relation to the rest of reality…than what we had before. It’s so highly mediated, that its a new thing.

Privacy in our previous incarnation meant certain things that are different from what that concept means in the online incarnation. So much of what we are doing online is a creation of a certain kind using different kinds of information. The rules and tools and reasons that make that new thing “work” are different than what works in our “other” or “previous” incarnations.

So there are two things that are really tricky for our age, our time, right now.
One, is learning what a self is in this new online form…and all that goes along with muddling through to some awareness of how that “works”….

And Two….figuring out the appropriate relationship between our previous self’s needs for privacy, and our new needs for privacy. The two may well not be that compatible…

I tend to trust Julia’s leadership in the online privacy thing, where she is out there in so many respects…online…but she is a bit different about her non online person…and has some ideas about how the two work together.

I don’t really understand it myself, but I’ve been a risk taker with changing concepts of self…and I do believe somewhat in the revealed self being the our best chance to reach our fullest human potentials. I tend to fall on the side of self revelation being the means by which relationship grows…and also tend to think that’s the best part of our destiny.

But of course, the world is also a dangerous place, and security, and the ability to be safe are important parts of creativity and the willingness to be able to take chances and “be oneself” in the face of authoritarianism and convention.

Are you feeling lucky punk?
The thing is I don’t think we can reach the potentials of the self online without letting go of some privacy concerns…but that’s not to say I fully envision how we can do that and still have the needed levels of security>>> This kind of reminds me of the sixties counterculture, where it wasn’t sometimes “safe” to be “weird”, but people did it anyway.

The culture as a whole probably benefited from some people’s willingness to test the limits of change, though in individual cases, some lives were destroyed in the process.

In other words, if we dont’ test the limits of how much freedom in the realm of personal revelation online we can manage…we’ll never know how far we can go. But some people are going to get hurt by being the one’s who set the limits for us by exceeding what’s safe and crashing.

In this cohort, I think it’s been a plus to not be afraid and be hanging out frankly and honestly…some of that has to exist to have community…but I’m also not sure of what is the “safe” limit for self revelation either…maybe it’s a choice one can only have one or the other but not both?

John

Dreamweaver tryout

Notes On DreamWeaver:
Okay, the first screen that pops up when the application opens has a long list of possible actions to take. About a third of them involve terms or choices I have never heard of.

I click a link that takes me to a webpage with Adobe help and resources. A long list of contents in the index sidebar on this page…and a search window. Again, terms I don’t think I’ve heard before, or at least have no clue what they are referring to. What is an ASP.NET, what is ColdFusion forms, what are Spry pages…what is CSS? I click on a link to the online Help Resource Center online documentation , select Dreamweaver, and end up with a way to access comprehensive hlep for “using Dreamweaver” for “Spry 1.4 Developer Guide” “Extending Dreamweaver” and Dreamweaver API Reference. All four of these have links to LiveDocs or PDF.

On this same page there’s also a sidebar of additional resources, forums, developer center, design center, training, labs….and knowledgebase, dreamweaver exchange, extension manager, live docs … There I find a link to something called CS3 Video Workshop. Which has a number of tutorials for different Adobe products. I choose Dreamweaver after starting the Video Workshop, which shows all the topics available for Dreamweaver. I choose the topic “getting started” , and that shows a list of videos for that topic. I click to watch “creating links” which is about 4 minutes, and shows how to create links within the site, outside the site and to an email function.

That looks very easy to do. So I’m off to a good start, plus I get to see the layout of the DW windows for a site creation….
After watching one more getting started “video” I open DW to take a look at a site using a starter page….hoping to see what windows open, and where the menus are and what’s in the menus etc.

It tells me I must start a new site in the manage sites window. This leads to opening the “site definition” dialog box/wizard, which I’m not ready for, so I cancel. I also find the Adobe Help Viewer 1.1 which is apparently not online but a separate app that has opened in my laptop’s memory. It looks a lot like what the help online looks like. I decide to check out what’s new in Dreamweaver 9. That’s a good choice because it explains a number of items such as Spry… After reading through this I decide I’m tired of not knowing some of the terms such as CSS etc and look it up at wikipedia…ah, Cascading Style Sheets…

Reading about CSS there are links to a veritable sea of acronyms…a zillion MLs, and then stuff like AJAX, and the above ASP.net and Yet to see a link reference to “cold fusion” but wikipedia is obviously an education in itself about this stuff. Looked up any term I had heard of, and got some idea of what it does. Apparently LAMP is a very good way to go…Have to see how that works with Dreamweaver…

LAMP Linux is the operating system, Apache is the web server application, MYSQL is the database server/.database management system.and P is for PHP the server side scripting language/programming language which allows added features such as widg ets. I think.

Apache is primarily used to serve both static content and dynamic Web pages on the World Wide Web. Many web applications are designed expecting the environment and features that Apache provides.

Apache is the web server component of the popular LAMP web server application stack, alongside Linux, MySQL, and the PHP/Perl/Python programming languages.

Apache is redistributed as part of various proprietary software packages including the Oracle RDBMS or the IBM WebSphere application server. Mac OS X integrates Apache as its built-in web server and as support for its WebObjects application server. It is also supported in some way by Borland in the Kylix and Delphi development tools. Apache is included with Novell NetWare 6.5, where it is the default web server.

Apache is used for many other tasks where content needs to be made available in a secure and reliable way. One example is sharing files from a personal computer over the Internet. A user who has Apache installed on their desktop can put arbitrary files in the Apache’s document root which can then be shared.

Programmers developing web applications often use a locally installed version of Apache in order to preview and test code as it is being developed.
Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) is the main competitor to Apache, trailed by Sun Microsystems’ Sun Java System Web Server and a host of other applications such as Zeus Web Serve

PHP primarily acts as a filter. The PHP program takes input from a file or stream containing text and special PHP instructions and outputs another stream of data for display.

So then I thought, look up Dreamweaver on wikipedia see what they say about it. Heres’ what it says:

Dreamweaver is a web development tool.

As a WYSIWYG editor, Dreamweaver can hide the details of pages’ HTML code from the user, making it possible for non-coders to create web pages and sites. A professional criticism of this approach is that it produces HTML pages whose file size and amount of HTML code is much larger than they should be, which can cause web browsers to perform poorly. This can be particularly true because the application makes it very easy to create table-based layouts. In addition, some web site developers have criticized Dreamweaver in the past for producing code that often does not comply with W3C standards though this has improved considerably in recent versions. Dreamweaver 8.0 (the version prior to the recently released 9.0 within CS3) performed poorly on the Acid2 Test, developed by the Web Standards Project. However, Macromedia has increased the support for CSS and other ways to lay out a page without tables in later versions of the application, with the ability to convert tables to layers and vice versa.


Adobe Dreamweaver CS3

Dreamweaver allows users to preview websites in many browsers, provided that they are installed on their computer. It also has some site management tools, such as the ability to find and replace lines of text or code by whatever parameters specified across the entire site, and a templatization feature for creating multiple pages with similar structures. The behaviors panel also enables use of basic JavaScript without any coding knowledge.

With the advent of version MX, Macromedia incorporated dynamic content creation tools into Dreamweaver. In the spirit of HTML WYSIWYG tools, it allows users to connect to databases (such as MySQL and Microsoft Access) to filter and display content using scripting technologies such as Active Server Pages (ASP), ASP.NET, ColdFusion, JavaServer Pages (JSP), PHP, and more without any previous programming experience. Dreamweaver 8.0 also included support for WYSIWYG XSLT editing.

Dreamweaver can use “Extensions” – small programs, which any web developer can write (usually in HTML and JavaScript). Extensions provide added functionality to the software for whoever wants to download and install them. Dreamweaver is supported by a large community of extension developers who make extensions available (both commercial and free) for most web development tasks from simple rollover effects to full-featured shopping carts.

As of version 8, Dreamweaver supports syntax highlighting for the following languages out of the box:
• ActionScript
• Active Server Pages (ASP)
• ASP.NET
• C#
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• ColdFusion
• EDML
• Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML)
• Extensible Markup Language (XML)
• Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)
• Java
• JavaScript
• JavaServer Pages (JSP)
• PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP)
• Visual Basic (VB)
• Visual Basic Script Edition (VBScript)
• Wireless Markup Language (WML)

It is also possible to add your own language syntax highlighting to its repertoire.

Syntax highlighting is a feature of some text editors that displays text—especially source code—in different colors and fonts according to the category of terms. This feature eases writing in a structured language such as a programming language or a markup language as both structures and syntax errors are visually distinct. Some editors also integrate syntax highlighting with other features, such as spell checking or code folding.

The Spry Framework is an open source Ajax framework developed by Adobe which is used in the construction of Rich Internet Applications. Unlike other pure JavaScript frameworks such as the Dojo Toolkit and Prototype, Spry is geared towards web designers, not web developers, although it is increasingly difficult to decouple these two fields.

The Spry framework broadly consists of
• Spry Effects – animation effects based on the Script.aculo.us library
• Spry Data – data binding to HTML markup using minimal code or proprietary markup. Spry uses Google’s XSLT JavaScript library to convert XML into JavaScript objects
• Spry Widgets – framework for development of widgets, and included widgets such as the accordion

accreditation and learning, two separate functions?

Thanks Dr. Gadget for your serious and comprehensive replies. And Thanks to Ann as well.

I really do appreciate the opportunity to have a chance to understand how you might be thinking about various things.

I’ll try a quick response here…

First, yes, SillyBus is focused on the introduction and induction process and is pretty much content free as such. But that’s what I want to do…somebody’s got to do it…why not me? I do think this is a very important part of any online course. Yes, at some point, there will be a few marriages with content, and who knows, perhaps working together with your spatial. But for the class, for me, it’s a big enough job to focus on the form and tools of the Welcome World and parts of Discussion world.

You see, this same function will be very important at sites such as Seniors Online Las Cruces, and also Public Knowledge Exchange. Happy to talk more about that in our next class on tools etc.

Second, yes I asked a lot of questions about accountability. I tried to indicate I don’t necessarily have the answers to those questions. I tend to see both sides of an issue, or if it’s a circular issues, the whole ball of wax, and try to understand how all the various interests contribute to the whole.

Glad to have your description of a day in the life of a teacher.
I think I’m probably most sympathetic to the trials and tribulations of teachers, over any other vocation, or working stiff. Your detailing did nothing to diminish that admiration.

Despite such efforts that, as you point out, are really beyond what we can reasonably expect anyone to do, and yet so many teachers do just that, in the end, there is apparently still some fundamental disjunct between the amount of effort and funds used, and the end product.

I’m just as curious as the next guy, is there anything that can be done about that? And you are so very right that a lot of situations in life are simply the best that we can manage.

However, what with the technological changes in what forms education can use, or what means it can take advantage of, there’s perhaps a reasonable glimmer that maybe now some of the change resistant problems of which you speak can be “addressed” favorably. I don’t know that online tech can and will solve those problems: I just hope that it might.

As to accreditation, I admit I’m positing a new way of thinking about things, a bit. Or at least a lot different than what is presently done as the status quo. I agree with you on meritocracy in general. I’m not saying throw out accreditation. However, I’m wondering how this function may evolve as more educational opportunities are present online, and for free to students around the world, and in this country too.

What I’m suggesting is a decoupling between the educational institutions, and the accreditation or certification process. And it’s in the nature of a hunch, that there will be a great deal of pressure building as online education proliferates to decouple those two processes.

This is not to say accreditation, degrees, etc are thrown out, it’s to say that certain gate keeping functions move from the control of one kind of institution, to a different kind of institution. One where a person would pay bucks to be “accredited” or to receive “degrees” or “certificates” or “licenses to practice” etc….but not to an educational institution.

One learns in one place. One could get accreditation at a different place, through a different function…

Because I’m positing they are two different functions, learning and accreditation… with two very different kinds of accountability attached. What if we split those functions up, instead of expecting learning institutions to provide accreditation functions also??

Is that a crazy idea? Seems like it makes some kind of sense to me, but what do I know?

Anyway, thanks for the very useful and meaningful discussion!

John

The Whole Enchilada

What a learning week it’s been for me!

I think I can finally talk without ranting about what I think should be added to our taxonomy of learning.

We are very complex beings. There are a lot of ways to know something important about existence. We are not machines. Our bodies are not meat robots, our brain is not a computer, our emotions are not “attitudes”. And for most of us, we are aware there is something about how all our “parts” of being fit together, or integrate, that brings along with it an experience of something inexplicable. Call it a mystery, call it transcendence, call it simply being alive, call it something in religious terms..there a certain something in the spark of human consciousness we must include in our educational equations.

The problem for teaching and learning, is that inexplicable part…the way it all fits together into a whole greater than the parts. I don’t have the answer to that, but I think we need to be aware of trying to incorporate the full human being into any learning taxonomies.

In the area of affective and psychomotor, we are especially lacking in incorporating all the human dimensions, in our “educational programs”. And to put it bluntly, those “parts” cannot be an afterthought. It’s all connected. Our cognitive sensibilities cannot truly succeed without fully integrating all the parts of the self, including those vague concepts such as “heart” or “spirit”.

I believe that is partly why so many students travel through the educational system and do not come out ready and equipped for life. And also why so many drop out. They are not fully engaged, and their whole being is not “addressed”.

John

Creativity as learning method

s- creatively figure out how to include creativity as a kind of learning (though where in KSA? )(john)
NOTE to JOHN – I think creativity is more like an expression or outcome of a specific set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes rather than a type of learning… In other words, IMHO, your creativity is an expression of what you know. You don’t learn “creative” you learn the knowledge of words and then creatively apply them; you learn concepts and then connect them together in creative ways to express that knowledge of concepts in new ways. Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy actually has creativity as one of the categories within knowledge domain. (Bethany)

NOTE to BETHANY: I appreciate the explanation of creativity as you conceive of it. You of course may be right, and I may just be too stupid or lazy to understand the material. Or we may be saying the same thing and I haven’t figured that out yet. Or it may be that I learn by thinking “my own way”, not accepting or integrating what others think? But giving me the benefit of the doubt, I’m going to plunge ahead here.

I think creativity is something different, which may be at the heart of my problems with this taxonomy. Despite appearances of a discrete unit operating in our heads that goes through steps such as described by taxonomies, I would posit that we simply don’t understand what is going on “up there” enough to come to such conclusions. My guess is that when we do eventually have the capability to understand what is going on in the brain, and how we experience that process as consciousness, a lot of theories will have to be redone. Which btw, has pretty much been the fate of all “brain theories” and “consciousness theories” so far. Which is the problem I have with psychology. Each new theory is now the true one, and we should just forget about all the ones that came before that “didn’t work out”.

Since, in my recently humbled opinion, no one really knows, I prefer to posit my theory of creativity as being a learning process. I would not know how to break it down into one of three learning types. But, from my experience, all parts of my awareness, and parts of the unconscious mind, in all flavors of cognitive, affective and psychomotor and perhaps other categories as well are involved in the creative “act” which produces a “learning product”. I would argue that a painting by Picasso for example, is something learned by Picasso in the act of painting it.

On a more personal level, my experience of creativity and learning, is that I approach a new situation, such as a lesson assignment, or life circumstance obliquely. I don’t know exactly what the way in is. So I hang with it, and pick up whatever I can by somewhat random acts of learning. A “door” opens, I start to gain a general set of connections and patterns and facts and the web between “elements”. The web between is a key, because it is not something that can be “brought into consciousness” as a whole. Yet it’s the essential part that makes learning work. It’s not a “rational” process, it’s some kind of absorption into an environment. After enough exposure, which may be lengthy, or short, pleasant or disagreeable…..

I somehow create my own version as a whole, my painting as it were, and can then, having learned that whole, make deductions and inferences and projections from it. Or I may find out what I have learned by talking or writing, with the learning product/objective unconscious, but acting as the source for “spin off” of learning bits. (john)

Mind Poison

*****WARNING: RANT IN PROGRESS, PROCEED AT OWN RISK**********

Oh no, not another one of these rubric chart dealies with everything BROKEN down into little parts according to some “expert’s” ideas of how to think about learning.

I was just mellowing out in the course…now it’s back to the task of fending off conventional minded and inadequate theories of reality and learning. To sum up my first reaction to Mr. Bloom and this chart…it’s mind poison. At least for me.

Back in the 50’s when Mr. Bloom published a book cited for this chart, the psychological world was aflame with Behaviorism. Just one of a long series of isms brought to us by the mediocre minds of psychology, who manage to get just enough right to be really dangerous with the parts they get wrong. Definitely “B” Ark material, to quote Douglas Adams.

“”"Has a value system that controls their behavior. The behavior is pervasive, consistent, predictable, and most importantly, characteristic of the learner”"”"”

It’s really hard to know where to get started.

3 types of learning…short a few types, perhaps?

Affective learning…that’s just another way of saying “attitude?” Where did that idea come from… prisons? Emotions are there to be “controlled”? That’s their function? Something to squash?

Then the 3rd kind of learning is an afterthought? Uh, welcome to the multimedia world of personal expression…

Any categorizing of this kind is tricky…we learn as a whole being, and any attempt to categorize conscious or so called unconscious processes is lame indeed, given the level of understanding we presently have of how the mind or the brain or the body work together.

But this has not stopped people from proposing such charts, and this one is hierarchical to boot! Wow!! Impressive sets of presumptions at work, and we are tasked with getting to the bottom of where these ideas came from, and what schools of thought etc they are based on. Gag me with a pitchfork, as it’s a lot of work digging through the intellectual trash bins of history, or the shelves of academia, to find the sources for this stuff.

In other words, in order to make such a chart-o-learning, one would need a very subtle and comprehensive understanding of how we not only “think”, or feel, or intuit, but also how we process sense perceptions, indeed how we “construct” consciousness”….so in a way this kind of exercise is pathetically inadequate in the face of what we don’t know about the human experience/condition/brain/mind/body….the self and the social construction of reality etc etc….

And then we get into inculcating “values” into the little ones….Internalizing values= brain washing

“”"Instructional objectives are concerned with the student’s general patterns of adjustment (personal, social, emotional)”"”

Okay, I’ll take my cool aid, and study this for whatever I can get out of it. Ya know sometimes paying attention to what one doesn’t agree with can help formulate what one does think, instead. And that could be a very good thing. As I am interested in learning. I just don’t want to be assuming I know best for everyone how their brain should be put together…

John the Rantor

Harsh Realities

Is learning a product, or an experience? In a capitalist society, is there any real value for sheer enjoyment of learning for learning’s sake?
Enthusiasm for the material despite the fact that it may not be remunerative, or lead to a financial gain in the future?
Does what the learning entails fit what a job might entail, or enhance one’s ability to “make a living?”.

When knowledge workers are the workers of the future, does the enthusiasm for learning take on financial value?
Can someone like me, that follows his bliss, and acts from his abilities and enthusiasms and curiosities and needs, rather than strictly economic considerations, actually fit into conventional economic roles now?

Is it up to me to create that economic role out of thin air? Can that be done, or are the rules of capitalism going to squeeze out the actually interesting part of the work, inevitably?

Jimmy Don on Learner Analysis

Message no. 321
Author: James Carlton
Date: Sunday, April 8, 2007 9:40pm
How important is it to understand your learners or potential learning audience?

Pro – If you hope to be able to “reach” your audience you had best know everything you
can about them. That is why we always have the “greet and meet” sessions at the
beginning of most types of learning courses. Questionaires and standarized blurbs about
learning or physical disabilities provide further information about your audience if they
respond. I think it is most important, but then I am a kinesthetic touchy-feely kind of
guy. I love people and like to know them as best I can. That allows me to be
empathetic when appropriate.

Con – In a situation where the audience is broadly dispersed it may not be possible or
desirable to know too much. Simply state the requirements for participation in the
syllabus or pre-registration course materials and hope that only those that feel they can
fully participate will sign up. If the course is set up this way there is no need to know
anything personal about your audience.

What Challenges do you think are inherent in conducting a learner analysis?

Pro – You always face the reality that students may or may not tell you everything about
themselves. You can do the “meet and greet” post an introduction – meet once face to
face (the NMSU way) design a questionaire that answers some basic questions relevant
to learning styles and the course being offered. But, you still will only learn what the
student wants you to know. There is also the possiblility that you might not know enough
about certain learning characteristics to put everyone in the right “basket”. There is the
challenge of then designing the course to meet the needs of all the learners

Con – Just ask the participants to introduce themselves and tell about their interests -
what they expect from the course what is their background and leave it at that. They will
tell what they want to tell and not tell the rest. Don’t worry about it too much – just make
sure you are addressing obvious needs.

Is a learner analysis always possible?

Pro – Sure. You can go shallow or deep with this idea.

Con – Nope – you may not have time to gather the data and do a sufficient analysis. This
could be because the class is large.

If not, then are there strategies that could be employed that would improve the success
of your learning environment for the greatest number of students?

Yes, you can employ a number of techniques to disiminate the materials so you meet the
needs of auditory and visual learners. For kinesthetic learners you can develop projects
to meet their needs. Like choice time in first grade. Choose from one of the following
activities… Discussion chats can be a problem because some don’t type very fast and
find the chat intimidating… voice chats or choice are a good substitute… Allow students
freedom to interact with each other, the materials and the instructor in a variety of
modalities. However, the more you do in this area the more work it is for the instructor
to keep up and give equitable time and grades to the different students.

Jim

Family Feud model of ‘learner analysis”

Message no. 278
Author: John Griffith
Date: Sunday, April 8, 2007 3:48am
Come on, admit it. You’ve watched Family Feud at least once. I note that there’s a spanish
language version on now too. Plus a thousand years of reruns with different hosts and from
different cultural time capsules with different styles of personal appearance etc And
different “correct” answers too.

Well, it occured to me as I conduct my marathon solo discussion session in the wee hours,
that Family Feud was based on a failry useful model for learning analysis. One had to guess
how a group of 100 people would answer a question. So not only was it necessary to
imagine a single respondent to the question and what they might think, but a whole series
of respondents…100 of them to be exact.

And the answers might be correct or incorrect, but the point was tyring to figure out the
most TYPICAL response. And it struck me this is the model used to design most courses.

Or is it? Or should it be? Should we at least temporarily abandon institutional expectations
and standards, and teach to the TYPICAL class AS THEY ARE? Isn’t that what an
educational institution would be FORCED to do eventually? Or could they continue on without
change even if huge numbers of students failed and dropped out?? Gee, that couldn’t
happen, could it???

Do we then need to be good at this guessing game? Perhaps so.

So, there you have it. The Family Feud model of learner analysis put in play for course
design…

John

Knowing the learner, knowing the course

Message no. 276 [Reply of: no. 272]
Author: John Griffith
Date: Sunday, April 8, 2007 3:22am
Claudia stated in her post: “The question that naturally arises is how much of the course should be
adapted to the students needs since every cohort may be different and
have different needs to attend. Other question is how valid is the data
collected to be materialized in a instructional change that benefits future
cohorts.”

Claudia,
I like your subject line question….”How important is the learner?” As
education moves online the learner takes on ever more “importance” and
the educational institution “less importance”. The learning program or
experience has to take into account a lot more of the individuality of the
learner, and cannot expect to “mold” the learner to fit the institutional
needs as much as in traditional learning. Or such is my opinion anyway.

I also like your statement about the validity of data collected as far as
guiding future changes. I wouldn’t be too surprised if our beloved
instructional cohort gets the lessons from 460 all wrong by paying attention
to “poor quality data” that they derive from our surveys and evaluations….
I’m not saying they will get it wrong, I’m just saying it would be EASY to get
the wrong idea because this data probably isn’t anywhere near complete
enough for any kind of objective analysis.

Frankly, probably the only thing really wrong about 460 was that it was a
16 week course squeezed in to 8 weeks. But that won’t stop them from
messing it all up because of the feedback and surveys and assuming the
problem was something other than too much in too little time. IMO.

So often, even in the “best” of “scientific studies” the data really isn’t as
good as those doing the study think. That’s one of the reasons we get so
much conflicting information about, for example, what foods are good for
you and what foods are bad for you. Truly reliable studies of human
behavior are extremely difficult to carry out!! You touch on this idea again
below…

“I see the challenges associated to conduct a learner analyses, primarily
because, it is limited to the capacity of conducting research in this area for
the institution in charge.

Although, Hanna, Glowacki-Ducka & Conceição (2000) recommend to use
entry-surveys and diagnosis at the beginning of the course, any
modification of the course design may imply the use of fresh resources for
evaluate and redesign courses and programs. Another limitation is the
analysis itself. That means how much analyses is possible to do if teachers
and instructors are not experts in psychology and students may do not
know well their own characteristics and limitations for being an online
learner.

These limitations may be extended to face-to-face settings too.”

I had to quote this because I really enjoy the name “Glowacki-Ducka”.
That name makes my day!!! But yes, how much analysis can we do if we
are not experts in analysis? How often are teachers going to get it all
wrong, and classify a student in the opposite group from what they really
are? Put a “likes structure” student in with somebody like me by mistake
for class project?

Disaster ensues! =^)

John
I can’t believe it, but I think I finished the assignments for this week. Wow,
and it’s only 3:15 am….I’ve got about 20 hours of free time until it’s time to
get started on the next lessons…I think I’ll spend the first 8 of those hours
asleep…and miss all the easter bunny stuff. Do rabbits even like colored
eggs? What’s that all about? I always kind of dropped my eggs off the
spoon into the dye cups, and cracked them, and the coloring got into them.
And I had those egg salad sandwiches of weird colors for my school lunches
for days afterwards… One time my dad hid an egg so well in our house we
didn’t find it until we “nosed” it about six months later…

Andragogy, I respond

Message no. 262 [Reply of: no. 257]
Author: John Griffith
Date: Saturday, April 7, 2007 9:16pm
Sultan of Camel Peripherals (gadgets)

Oh yeah, you really grokked it this time dude!
Terrific distinction you’ve made between pedagogy, and androgogy.

I’ve been wondering how it could be that the “teaching” in higher education is basically not
based on training in pedagogy and instead it’s assumed that the expertise in content is
really all that’s needed.

And that, for k-12, the assumption was reversed, that a “teacher” was not an expert in
content, but an expert in pedagogy.

Which as a lateral thinker, seemed to cry out for some Po. Or truth be told, it seemed
absurd enough on it’s face that it didn’t need any Po.

And now you’ve gone and done your own Po by coming up with a good link that discusses
this very thing, absurdity, or what have you, in depth, and with historical referrence.

And you throw away a great line about how profs focus on a “discipline”…
Way to go!

Also like your simple revelation of the obvious, that we bring not only some sort of
consistent “learning style” to the material, but we also bring a very transient human state of
the moment, that involves radical changes in mood, energy level, acuity, stress, etc etc.
To say nothing of hormonal variations, blood pressure swings, bio rhythms of all sorts, and
environmental conditions such as quiet or noise, calm or chaos.

And then there’s this bottom line of bottom line thoughts, clearly from an earlier era when
one could speak this way, and people would buy into it… =^)

” Learning is work. Nobody likes work, but it’s gotta be done.” Devil Gadgets

Give me some time with that one, and I could probably deconstruct it too….and I’d have a
valid poke in the ribs point or two to say about it….but I don’t think one can totally get rid
of that…learning is, at least sometimes, and in some parts, work that we might not always
like to do.

John

Dr. Gadget talks adragogy

Message no. 257
Author: Michael Demers
Date: Saturday, April 7, 2007 7:43pm
Learner Analysis Discussion: Dr. Gadget

1. How important is it to understand your learners or potential learning audience?
I must admit that, until recently I really didn’t focus on this topic, although it was always
a topic of conversation. I think the real issue is that, in the past, there was so little
known about how people learn, especially within the educational psychology literature, it
was mostly a heuristic response based on experience rather than well thought out and
strategically planned. It is my belief that the old “teacher focused” model of education is
ineffective and that “learner centered” methods are not only more effective, but were
historically used even in the ancient world. What have we done? I’ve found the history
of the term androgogy useful for helping me understand what went wrong with our
education. The url is http://agelesslearner.com/intros/andragogy.html.

Tools of Ignorance

Tools of Ignorance bent to the task at hand guy,

I like your explanation of goals and moving levels of achievement as a
substitute for standards. That helps me think a bit more like you, in making it
work better, by redesigning some of the components, rather than starting
over from scratch, the whole educational enterprise.

Similarly, your use of the word clients, instead of customers, and your
explanation of the distinction you make. You mentioned that before, and now
I think I understand you much better. Yes, somehow the client needs to
invoke some clarity about learning goals and methods and ways to evaluate
the usefullness of various online activiities in those areas.

I wonder how that will work? Maybe if people think of learning as something
they want for their own reasons, then it’s possible they will apply some self
evaluation as to effectiveness of various available learning tools, and in
effect, discipline themselves… maybe you’ve hit on a key point, that if adults,
or children, see themselves as customers, then it doesn’t work.

Sometimes a customer is very diligent about evaluating what he or she is
shopping for, but doesn’t expect to have to do much learning after purchase?

This sounds like a Henry Youngman joke…about marriage…

There’s certainly a lot of customers out there on the web.

This needs more thinking. I don’t grok it as yet.

Lateral Thinker?

Gadget-o-person,

I know accreditation and standards are a big part of Education with a capital E.

I don’t know how people such as yourself deal with this fact in the real world, so it’s great to
get some feedback from those struggling with how to make it all work.

And I grant you that people of good will can find a way, even under very trying
circumstances to git er done. A lot of the people I have met in the cohort fit that
description.

And yet, I still wonder how, in the evolving world of online education with a small E, what
roles accreditation and standards are going to play, because I think it’s going to be
different. When people have alternate ways to buy the car, a lot of them will simply go
online and click through to the lowest prices, and forget about the “real time” dealer with his
standards and process that most people don’t enjoy.

And no, I don’t mean to compare teachers to car dealers, not at all…..although sometimes I
might be tempted to compare ed admin roles to same. That’s just me getting carried away
with a dramatic analogy…the kind Plato warned us against.

For better or worse, I just posit that a new way of thinking about standards and
certifications that adjusts to the fact that the customer is going to have a lot more “Power”
in the new online world. Or if not power, a lot of alternatives to “standard” educational
means. And I’d just guess that changes things enough for a new way of invoking standards
rather than imposing standards will be needed.

But as you noted, I’m out here on the borderland, doing my Po.

“provacative operation”:
“A notation used in lateral thinking, is Po. This stands for provocative operation and is used
to propose an idea, which may not necessarily be a solution, or a ‘good’ idea in itself, but
moves thinking forward to a new place where new ideas may be produced.” Wikipedia

beta testing

Susie B Anthony,

Those are great suggestions!

Beta testing….duh….I should have thought of that.

Like in this cohort? Sometimes I think we are in 1.0….and sometimes beta.999.

Tap into expertise of those who have already done it….also kind of a no brainer.

And those links where one can “take an online inventory of learning styles” a good
stimulant to thinking about this…kind of like other “inventory taking” stuff that goes on
online at various kinds of sites.

And have different versions of training modules that a learner could “be directed to” on the
basis of various kinds of inputs/inventories/surveys etc…. the way to go for many general
use sites.

Work never done. You are so right about that. Have we realized that a lot of what we learn
is simply going to be the basis for continuing learning for the rest of our lives? The
technology is NOT going to stand still…

Web Training Modules

J, A few more suggestions to add to your list of strategies of how to get to know your
audience include:
Tap into the expertise of developers of web training modules that have a lot of useful
information to share.

Beta testing the product (Standard business procedure)

Use a learning sytle inventories online tool
free-learning-styles inventory.com (http://www.learning-styles-online.com/inventory/)
Abiator’s Learning Style Inventoryhttp://www.berghuis.co.nz/abiator/lsi/lsiframe.html

Develop different versions of the training modules that users will be directed to based on
the learning style

Evaluation/feedback survey tools (Oh, so common on the web) for modules

Obviously these suggestions are not new or innovative. However, with the ever evolving
nature of the web and technology, (y)our work is never really static or done. The
instructional design process/product is iterative.
Susie B. =;->

Understanding Learners

I guess this discussion might best work with the numbered answer
approach, and take the questions in order, so it’s clear what I’m arguing
against, that I just argued for.

1) PRO: Extrememly important to understand the audience for ANY type of
communication, and especially one that increases in effectiveness the more
it is customized to the learner. We have entered the age of customized
mass communication, a kind of oxymoron, that really means, our
communication tools have become sophisticated enough that we can adjust
who gets what message much more than previously possible. So, I we can
determine that a student is a “structure philiac learner” then we can
“earmark” a lesson plan for that student that fits that learning approach,
while still have alternate plans that we can make available and “send” to
those students with different learning stlyes.

1) CON: Sometimes, what’s most important is a STANDARDIZED
communication. When institutions communicate with their constituents
about anything “official” they have certain institutional needs such as legal
concerns that prohibit the customized to a particular person approach. A
problematic area would be grading and certification policies. If different
students could satisfy graduation and course requirments in a customized
individualized manner, how can the institution retain “standards” that
accrediting institutions require? It can be done, but it’s a lot more
personpower intensive to extend the possibilty of individuality to every
student. Or citizen. Or cable TV customer. =^)

2) PRO: Not always possible to get a good read on the “targeted learner”
for a number of obvious reasons. Until an individual “reveals’ themselves,
how do we know who they are?

2)CON: Ah, the wonders of demographic research allow us to know a lot
about an individual without them intentionally revealing anything. For better
of worse, that’s the world we live in, where if one knows how, one can find
out more about a person than most of his friends and family knows, and
even stuff the person has probably forgotten about.

So, if I needed to design a online course, or a webtool training module, and
wasn’t sure who my targeted audience was in general, or in specific, I do
tons of research, including even maybe paying for some demographic data.
In addition, I’d try to employ a survey or surveys of my targeted audience,
either done by me, or someone else. Then I’d try to design the online
learning experience in such a way as to allow the “student” to reveal as
much as possible about their learning style either through self reporting,
going through a group interview each other process, or take an online
survey or game. Maybe one of those supposedly revelatory “tests” such as
are employed by psychologists et al for employment or treatment, or???

Maybe study methods employed by dating sites, which seem to have the
greatest need to gather individual reporting about self.

John

Teacher Knows Best?

Puppeteer of electronic gear,

From your link about Androgogy, (happily not the same as androgyny…)

“John Dewey believed formal schooling was falling short of its potential. Dewey emphasized
learning through various activities rather than traditional teacher-focused curriculum. He
believed children learned more from guided experience than authoritarian instruction. He
ascribed to a learner-focused education philosophy. He held that learning is life not just
preparation for life.”

Right ON!!

That’s what I’ve been thinking. Learning is life as much as anything else, and it involves the
whole of the learning being, that’s us… and all learning is about life first, and some subset
of life , second…

Which means that a teacher deals not only with “materials” “learning objectives” “student
outputs” “measureable results”, but also with the mystery of living, which actually, believe it
or not, is the MORE IMPORTANT part of the whole education equation.

Not to say I understand how to do that “addressing of the whole person”, because for one, I
don’t like this value free word…”addressing” and for another I don’t have the experience
that a teacher brings to the process that enables them to show up themselves fully, and
meet their students who are also showing up fully, in a common endeavor that “leads to”
learning.

Wouldn’t mind learning how to do that….

What the world needs now…or let it be…the same old song

Julia,
Your post has a lot in it that floats my boat. And well spoken too.

This teaching thing has some dimensions I wasn’t that clear on.

You help bring some of that “extra” stuff into my awareness.

The Art of Possibility, which I just looked up at Amazon, one of these extra stuff dealies. Did you share this story with all of the cohort? If not, could be a good idea to…

Oh, and when I followed a link to Ben Zander videos I ended up at the “Employee University”, which has all kinds of interesting stuff:
http://employeeuniversity.com/

I guess since at the basic level teaching is about enabling human beings, it connects to all the elements of being alive. And somewhere in there, we start talking about the intangibles of what makes a human being the best he or she can be…

At that point in the conversation…I tend to bring out the spirtual flavored terminology.

Let me try here to say it without using those “religious” words, because we are in a “secular” context, I guess. Otherwise I’d point to a phrase like “the power of faith” as being very apropos here.

But, what if we said, that what exists is not all that CAN exist, and it’s in the nature of being to contain possibility. The universe clearly supports life, or we wouldn’t be here. From this we can simply observe that showing up, open to possibility, is one of the fundamental things to know about as a human being.

We come into the world knowing this. Apparently we can learn to forget how to do this. And fortunately, under various circumstances, we can also remember, or relearn it.

What a good thing for a “teacher” to understand, as you do. And how appropriate for the students in this region. It’s kind of reaching beyond what one might call “teaching” and into the realm of “inspired leadership” too.

And if you would humor me for a moment, I think this is really what it’s all about in our short passage on the planet as individual beings. Envisioning grace, using that creative function we all have to it’s highest purpose, for ourselves, and for others. I tend to think of it as doing the things the “I” part can do… which is mostly about showing up with a good ‘tude…and our choices do affect things….but in the end it’s faith that moves the mountains, because the real juice is in the “ONE” part.

Of course, I don’t spend all my days in clarity and grace…and have to settle for just knowing that it’s a mystery…as Slartibartfast said: the chances of every really knowing what’s going on are a tad slim. On occasion though, one has visions that come true.

Preacher John
(hey, you got me inspired… what can I say, I’m a blabber…or to use modern terminology, a blogger…)

How do I DO that?

Ex[plain] Embedded

Measuring Learning

From an email to class discussion…

Ah, turn about is fair play. Why not have the students assign themselves the points??

Gee, I think I recall someone in the cohort talking about this kind of an approach. I bet he or she is sorry now!

“Assigning the points” does seem to imply/require some form of scale, a criteria, a standard by which to “objectively” judge student output.

Two problems with that. Well, at least two. How do we determine in fact what “student output” is? In reality, we are attempting to measure what has been learned. Because that is so hard, so very hard to measure, we instead try to measure a defined student “output”.

And once we are doing that, are we still measuring student “learning”…. or are we constructing means to produce “student output”? If so, a course of learning becomes a course of producing “student output”. Right away we’re in trouble here.

But say we weren’t in trouble and we posit that “student output” is in fact the only practical way we are ever going to have to know if learning has taken place. Then we still have to confront all the difficulties of objectively judging that output. That’s a very difficult if not impossible task, because student’s are different, and thus student output is different. Beyond that teachers are humans, they are not objective machines.

So to obtain objective measurements of student output, we must first design courses that produce standardized student output that lends itself well to objective measurements. Or at least the appearance of objective measurements, with scores, and numbers that lend credence to the presence of rationality.

But unfortunately, statistics is a science of great complexity. It is beyond most of us to design statistically meaningful objective measuring devices of student output, so we are in trouble again. We must rely on experts far removed from our personal knowledge of what is valuable student output for a particular student. Or for a “typical student” from our ‘school’. Or from a typical student from our region… etc.

We are now a very long long way away from trying to measure learning of an individual in a particular course, or learning activity. Good luckwith that.

So, to get back to that place, of knowing if learning has occurred or not, and getting some picture of or “grasp” on what that learning might be, perhaps one needs to design a course that does not attempt to produce “student output” but learning experience. And incorporate into that learning experience a subjective, but workable way for student/ teacher to have a useful sense of what learning has or hasn’t taken place.

That’s not my book to write, I don’t think. Interesting topic though, and I’m sure it’s been addressed by many before me who have done it justice. I’m learning a lot just thinking about this, but I defer to others who have done the hard work on this topic.

To the direct question of POINTS EARNED:

I’d say I learned enough in this Blogstorming activity to pass on to the next activity, and that’s probably a good enough assessment for this part of the course. As with most of the course, I would suggest there’s a real problem with time allotted, because if one is really interested in what people have to say here, which is at least as rich a learning opportunity as the course itself, it’s going to be a lot longer than allotted.

I mean, really, if one is going to actually respond to what’s written by others, one does a disservice to them and to one’s self, if one just goes through the motions to get the points and finish the activity in time allotted. A real problem for formalized instruction in general.

So, since I didn’t work on this as much as I would have liked, but did work on it long enough to learn something meaningful, I’m giving myself whatever points equal passing the activity, which I take to be a B, which I take to be 80-90% of points allowed, say
85% which I think comes out to be: 34. What the hey does 34 mean re what I’ve learned?

It’s a number, so it must mean something, I guess.
John

A candid process, a future moment?

Liz,

Well, here we go.
This is already an interesting learning experience.
I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but I feel good that we have pushed in the direction we did. We owed it to ourselves to try something like this, and we owed it to our $$$ invested in the course. =^) And in a way, I kind of feel we owed it to OTL Julia, Susie and Bethany.

Now, we need to follow up, showing up on their turf, for what I anticipate will be a thoroughly stimulating discussion on Tues. Glad you are not a shrinking violet. Me neither. But I happen to like Julia and Susie and Bethany as persons a lot, and admire them, so that should help tone down any disagreements to a friendly “exchange of views”.

Bethany is forthright about the concerns they bring to the table:
1) Responsibility to the University to teach what they say they are going to teach
2) Responsibility to the community at large that those they certify/accredit have the knowledge/skills that they say they do.

I agree with her strongly that those two “requirements” are a part of this equation we are “solving”.

And we would add two more of our own.
1) Responsibility to ourselves, that our time, funds, energy provide learning experiences that we can use, that “work” for us, that enable our engagement with the subject, and support the process of our own natural learning ability and curiosity.
2) Responsibility to the community and to society as a whole to pursue the job and tasks we have taken on to the best of our ability by learning in the best way possible/ available to us.
3) Plus we owe it to other students to pursue change in education that may benefit them as well, such as your daughter Liz. And perhaps some other students in the cohort now, and in the future. I’m thinking of Sallie Lofton who is, I’ve learned a terrific person with a lot to give, but struggling in the cohort to fit in.

They are sort of thinking of everything that happens in the course as a “case study” for them. Which is very cool actually. And we are too, in our way.

Grist for the mill of future cohorts. Grist for the mill of doctoral dissertations. Grist for the mill of RETA projects. And ya know, it works for me to do the same for us, use everything as a learning experience as to how we might interact with higher ed institutions to develop the things we each want to develop. And not just the institutions themselves, but the people of which they are made.

I’m working on a hypothesis that now, and in the future, there will be a kind of “underground” association of individuals that transcends the HATS model of “who I work for”. Instead we will find through online networking etc, individuals that have similar goals, and come together in ad hoc communities to accomplish those goals. Of course this is already happening. It’s happening right here and now with this situation. And my point is that someday, it will be pretty hard to say exactly who or what one is working for, because that hierachical organization chart will have been superseded by a web of interactivity that obliterates institutional boundaries.

Plus for each day we are in the class NOT snowed under by assignments that keep us from doing what we are interested in, we develop our ideas for our projects and develop means to accomplish them.

We, in this case study, represent the future of online education. How much freedom and independence can a university program allow without endangering their certifying/accreditation/…gate keeping “Rights”? As we have pondered, there’s already nibbling going on around the edges of the pizza by such as Phoenix University, a hybrid semi pseudo institution. Soon there will be full on pseudo institutions that have the ability to project themselves as more than just a “diploma” mill, but stretch to the breaking point the idea of who is able to grant degrees, and what are they worth?

Uh, now, I wonder here, whether we wish to “submit”…that’s kind of an odd word when one thinks about it for a minute…something ahead of time before the meeting, or not. Bethany wants it, and of course, in a traditional bureaucratic tussle, having time to prepare arguments before a meeting is a big advantage, rather than going in cold as Bethany says.

A big part of our approach is that we want to be able to present our ideas in person, and avoid the little student versus big institution situation that we are trying to deal with. It’s not as if they can’t understand our ideas in context, and need to be prepared ahead of time. It’s not as if decisions need to be made right then. They can get together after we have talked and then work out what their personal and institutional hats need to do in response.

So I think I’m for saying in a polite way, maybe even forward some version of this email to them, that we would prefer to present our ideas in person, not via documents.

Howz this all looking to you? What’s rolling around in YOUR brain at the moment?

John

Another day, another apocalypse prediction

Ann,

Well I came here, and I tried to move your comment to the comment section but ran into technical difficulties, and moved it back. Now I don’t know what problems that may have created, and I apologize for anything amiss.

As it turns out I have a lot to say about your comment Ann, so maybe that snafu was a good thing. Yes, I was quite surprised to learn that University professors could actually be expected to teach without any “training” or education in teaching. Knowing the content considered knowledge enough. And the opposite for K-12.

As you point out the obvious, neither one appears to make any sense!! And now this apparent insanity extended to the online world where the responsibility for the technology operating correctly seems to fall between the cracks, and it’s the absolute bottom line for doing anything in that realm. Hmmmm.

I suppose there are reasons why the status quo is the way it is, hopefully there’s some rational explanation.

In any event, in my view, it’s all going to go through a tremendous reshuffling and reorganization, and education as we know it today will not be recognizable to students and teachers of ten years from now.

And a huge part of that belief in change is that I don’t think the present educational institutions are organized in such a way as to be able to adapt to a student centered model of instruction/learning.

As Naomi states. Since it’s going to be a battle for the desktop, and online digitized eyeballs and ears of students, the victor is likely to be private media corporations who have some idea of how to “capture imaginations” and the funds to invest to make it happen. My hope is that those corporations will be forced by the same dynamic of user centered experience to enable technologies dramatically more than they do today. The beginnings of online user centered experience are already here, and growing exponentially.

Will be interesting to see how this develops, and how present educational institutiions and teachers, find their way in a brave new world.

Griffith, JD, (2006) “Jason and the Arghh-o-nauts” Waiohinu, HI: OmniLand

RU Always Eating Chiles

John

Why is it so hard to use technology that is supposed to be easy?

Liz,

I very much agree, is that okay at this point in this assignment? As I was saying, I agree both with your points and Jim’s followup.

Major points:

1)Using computers has always been an order of magnitude harder than anyone seems to think it should be. This has been the case since back in the earliest days of mass computers say starting around 1984 or so, and is still the case today. The issues and problems drift around into different areas, and a lot of the problems eventually do get solved. Except the technology changes so fast that it doesn’t matter anymore that the hardware, the peripherals, the software are now “stable” or “secure”, because it’s now obsolete. And the new replacement stuff brings along it’s own problems, and new capabilities creates new difficulties.

Apparently ever thus….unless at some point innovation stops….then we’ll catch up I guess. But innovation probably won’t stop until the conditions which foster it go away, and we probably wouldn’t like that either…

2) Because it’s too hard, people need help. One big assumption I’ve made about the use and value of a hub/portal/community in one kind of place/space such as PKE, is that a necessary function is the handholding enabling support help part. In general, that part is simply overlooked in the whole equation of “how do we make this technology work.” IT part is always understaffed underpaid, and given impossible tasks, if there even is an IT part. And the IT part doesn’t necessarily work well with those who just need the technology to perform a function in a user friendly way. There’s some real inherent communication problems.

Also help, maintenance, upgrading, training etc overlooked because it’s hard to make money off it…and possibly because it’s a bottomless pit. The needs are so overwhelming, such that no one wants to take responsibility or get involved. Here in the class, the model is that the Online Instructor is going to also be a tech support expert. Well, that’s one model, and I wouldn’t disagree that some multiple hatting is going to be part of any online “profession”. But if this is the model, then the number of online instructors available is going to be a tiny fraction of those now employed in the teaching profession.

Bottom line is that I don’t see anyone anywhere who has “solved” the problem of keeping up with computer technology changes and innovations and difficulties of use. Huge corporations have their mission critical networks go down, and if they can’t do it, nobody can. It’s the emporers clothes thing, the exposed underbelly of our beast: we move ever closer to losing control of our technology at the same time that we entrust ever more critical functions to it. Hey, it’s just the paradox of our civilization, which “progresses” and becomes ever more vulnerable to entropy, both at the same time. And to quote one of the great minds of our era, the answer to life the universe and everything, according to our technological tools, is 42.

Which is what fundamentalists intuit. They’re scared, and search for some literal certainties. Maybe we should be scared too, but it’s kind of like the line from HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy…where Ford Prefect is asked by the barman whether we should put paper bags over our heads or something because the worlds’ going to end…and Ford says “sure if you like”..and the barman asks “will that help”…and Ford says “no”.

Adams, Douglas HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Del Rey 1995 Milsford

OR much better:

http://tinyurl.com/yp3tyt

1.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Mass Market Paperback – Sep 27, 1995)

2.

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story (Deluxe Edition) by Douglas Adams (Hardcover – Nov 1, 2005)

3.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Widescreen Edition) by Bill Bailey (IV), Anna Chancellor, Warwick Davis, and Mos Def (DVD – Sep 13, 2005)

4.

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Paperback – April 30, 2002)

Excerpt – page 5: “… book, a book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-not an Earth book, never published …”
› See more references to HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in this book.

5.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Peter Jones, Simon Jones, David Dixon, and Joe Melia (DVD – April 30, 2002)

6.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Audio CD – Jun 20, 2005) – Audiobook

7.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Talbot, Joby (Audio CD – April 26, 2005)

8.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 25th Anniversary Edition by Douglas Adams (Hardcover – Aug 3, 2004)

9.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Tertiary Phase by Douglas Adams (Audio CD – April 10, 2005) – Audiobook

10.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Quandary Phase by BBC Radio, Douglas Adams, and BBC Radio Cast (Audio CD – Oct 25, 2005) – Audiobook

11.

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide: Complete and Unabridged by DOUGLAS ADAMS (Hardcover – Jul 4, 1999)

12.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Full Screen Edition) by Bill Bailey (IV), Anna Chancellor, Warwick Davis, and Mos Def (DVD – Sep 13, 2005)

13.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Jones and Davey (DVD – Oct 4, 2005)

14.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and Stephen Fry (Audio CD – Mar 29, 2005) – Audiobook

15.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [Blu-ray] (Blu-ray – Jan 23, 2007)

16.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio Scripts by Douglas Adams (Paperback – Jul 1, 2005)

This is my little counterpoint to the belief that having academic referrences in a certain citation form is getting the job done. Books and publications are best referrenced, as Jim does, with a web link or web links, because there’s so much more information online than a single referrence citation is going to provide. Let’s just admit the obvious, times have changed, old methods of citation and referrance are lacking in depth and breadth. Let’s instead take advantage of the tremendous online resources that are available, and learn how to point to those referrences for our colleagues and our students.

The point of the link is that it does the job so much better. And it’s easy to just cut and paste it in. One doesn’t have to actually have the book in one’s hand to try and find out what city it was published in, etc etc.

John

RU Always Eating Chiles

In touch with what? online extension of the body…

Kati,
When I saw the references from the publisher Shambala, I had to comment. My last encounters with Shambala as a publisher were back in the days when they were the doing Tibetan Rinpoche books. Which was also a time when the counterculture started to split between those who wanted to ride the technological power of the microchip and computers because of the dramatic changes in personal empowerment that it portended, and those who fundamentally mistrusted technological advancement, and wanted to focus on “healing modalities” which often involved as you mention integrative body work of various kinds. The idea that spirituality came through being fully physically present, and whole, though disciplines such as yoga, or zazen, tai chi , meditation, holy dancing, chanting, massage, tantra etc.

Clearly there was a natural divide between those who were going with geek life styles where the knowledge machine brought about transcendent states, and those who felt that the body was the foundation of everything that could be accomplished.

Now, the differences are even more acute, as bandwidth has increased to provide ever more immersive virtual reality experiences. Clearly there’s not much room to just say well, the online world is too antithetical to the needs of the body, because it’s no longer a small off to the side part of our culture. On the other hand, it’s getting serious that huge numbers of us are turning into blobs of biomass with hours in a dark room sitting in a chair. Stats on child obesity seem to reflect a serious change in our group ability to focus on the body as our foundation for being. Among other related problems.

Clearly you are on to a continuation of this argument: are the extensions of the body, to use Mcluhan’s phrase, at war with the body, or in support of the body?

I guess it’s obvious that both points of view need to be attended to. We live in a knowledge machine world, and we also understand important parts of being human by “learning” and “studying” our bodies. So, a successful human now and in the future is one who works in both worlds of existence, the body, and the extensions of the body.

You mention this in your post, the western problem with mind/body duality. Recently you might be interested to learn that various western thinkers are coming up with another take on this problem, without abandoning the western tradition. Some recent biographers have re-examined Descartes ideas, and decided we have not really understood what he was saying accurately. They suggest that Descartes had more of an interest in placing his “duality” in a greater transcendent context, that he hinted at in various discussions about the role of God in this problem.

Here’s some references for body/mind, or it’s cousin brain/mind.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17217
http://www.nybooks.com/authors/369

Recently a very interesting article in the New Yorker, obviously a favorite source, about a couple who are philosophers studying brain/mind dualities, and looking to simply route around that problem through better understanding of neurobiology. Or “neuroscience”.

“Two Heads” by Larissa MacFarquhar, New Yorker magazine Feb. 12 2007.

The couple, Paul and Patricia Churchland propose that understanding the biology of the brain will solve the problem for us. That the brain is the mind. Which brings up an interesting point because I think we have to include the body when we speak of the mind, and also when we speak of the brain, because both are in a living connection with the other organs and the means of perception from the extend of our senses. Which extends beyond our body, in that our perceptions in the senses have their origins in phenomena beyond the limits of our body for senses such as smell, hearing, sight, and taste. Even touch, seems to generally require an outside object or phenomena to set off signals.

And if we are connected beyond our body/mind by our senses, even more so by our extensions such as the media we use. So in a real way, our brain/mind/body is situated in part beyond the borders, beyond the lines we draw using those words. And this has great import for online activities, because in a real way, our body is extended into the new electric spaces.

How do we “integrate that” and do “body work on that” and find “spiritual enlightenment in that”? You note the idea of disassociation, a kind of out of body type relation to our world. What’s odd about that, is that sometimes its when we are most aware of our body, our breathing that we find ourselves transported into that out of body space.

So, I tend to think we can carry our body along with us, in all that that implies, when we enter cyberspace. We may be in a way disassociated, but it may be that this is still a worthy and full connection to the meaningful transcendent. What we otherwise take to be the spirit, the soul, the god in us, the part of us in union with the whole….whatever the words we use, I would suggest comes along when we go online.

Now if that’s so, what is the relationship between that kind of electric transcendence into cyberspace, and the kind of transcendence of physical limits that we might experience in prayer, meditation, or enlightenment, or pure joy? If we can connect with others somehow through the power of spiritual activities, is this at all the same as the transcendence of jacking in to the web?

John

Uncanny Valley

uncanny valley n. Feelings of unease, fear, or revulsion created by a robot or robotic device that appears to be, but is not quite, human-like.

Example Citations:

Early in their collaboration, in the spring of 2002, Winston and Breazeal selected a name: Leonardo, “because this creature represents the ideal collaboration of art and science—an artist and a scientist working together to create something real,” Winston said. Then, in Los Angeles, Winston went to work on Leo’s body and face. One of the few guidelines from Breazeal was that Leo not look too human, lest he fall into the “uncanny valley,” a concept formulated by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist. Mori tested people’s emotional responses to a wide variety of robots, from non-humanoid to completely humanoid. He found that the human tendency to empathize with machines increases as the robot becomes more human. But at a certain point, when the robot becomes too human, the emotional sympathy abruptly ceases, and revulsion takes its place. People began to notice not the charmingly human characteristics of the robot but the creepy zombielike differences.
—John Seabrook, “It came from Hollywood,” The New Yorker, December 1, 2003

People generally relate better to animated figures that are distinctly outlandish than those that begin to approach the ideal. This is a phenomenon known to robotics researchers as “the uncanny valley”—that point where a robot is so close to lifelike yet still so short of ideal that people become focused on its imperfections.
“That’s where every neuron is focused on what’s wrong with the robot, on how its motion is not quite right,” said Bruce Blumberg, head of the synthetic character program at the MIT Media Lab. “The uncanny valley is a very bad place to be.”
—Michael A. Hiltzik, “Synthetic Actors Guild,” Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2001

Earliest Citation:
Highly technical entries cover terms from computer science, electrical engineering, linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy, along with jargon like end effector (essentially the robot’s hand), mechatronics (mechanics and electronics), selsyn (direction indicator), teach box (memorizes motions for a robot to duplicate), telechir (remotely controlled robot), and uncanny valley theory (that humans are more comfortable with robots that resemble humans—but only up to a point).
—”The McGraw-Hill Illustrated Encyclopedia of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence,” The Futurist, January, 1995

Notes:
As noted in the first example citation, the phrase uncanny valley was coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori (in 1978, but possibly before that), who sums up the feelings that can occur in the uncanny valley succinctly:

“If you shake an artificial hand [that you perceive to be real] you may not be able to help jumping up with a scream, having received a horrible, cold, spongy, grasp.”
—quoted in Jasia Reichardt, Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction, Thames and Hudson, 1978

Why a valley? Because if you graph people’s emotional reactions to a robot, they will generally increase (become more positive) as the machine’s similarity to a human being increases. However, at the point where the robot is nearly lifelike, a certain creepiness or even downright revulsion takes over and the emotional response collapses. If the robot could be made 100% human-like, then the emotional response would, of course, return to the favorable range. That emotional crash at the not-quite-human stage is the uncanny valley.

Related Words:
fyborg
posthuman
Stepford

Subject Categories:
Science – Psychology
Technology – General

Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich original source

Here, thanks to Wikipedia, is a short but amazing comment on Ivan Illich, one of the fiercest iconoclasts of our, or any other, time.
Note the use of the word WEB, as something needed for education…WOW!

Deschooling Society

His most celebrated work remains Deschooling Society (1971), a critical discourse on education as practiced in “modern” economies. Full of detail on then-current programs and concerns, the book can seem dated, but its core assertions and propositions remain as radical today as they were at the time. Giving real-world examples of the ineffectual nature of institutionalized education, Illich posited self-directed education, supported by intentional social relations, in fluid, informal arrangements:

Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education–and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.[1]

The last sentence makes clear what the title suggests — that the institutionalization of education is considered to tend towards the institutionalization of society, and conversely that ideas for de-institutionalizing education may be a starting point for a de-institutionalized society. And this is where the true radicalism of the ideas becomes clear. As a holistic thinker, with a formidable intellect and a truly catholic breadth of erudition, Illich always considers his insights in the widest possible terms.

The book is more than a critique — it contains positive suggestions for a reinvention of learning throughout society and throughout every individual lifetime. Particularly striking is his call (in 1971) for the use of advanced technology to support “learning webs.” His description of these webs was prophetic in many ways, relating to current uses and ideals of Wikipedia, Craigslist and of the Internet more generally. For example, Illich says, “The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.”

the Last School District in America

The Last Online School Sold to Omni Community
Last School District in America Disbands
by Ivan Illich JR, Trans America Times
Las Cruces NM

In the final bidding war for the last assets of the last School District in America, Omni Community beat out Foxland and consolidated their lead in the social networking wars. According to OC CEO Steve Jobs Jr, it was more of a symbolic purchase, as “the assets just weren’t worth that much anymore. Of course we didn’t want to see Foxland’s Robert Murdoch Jr get ahold of this piece of history. My dad would roll over in his cyrograve if that happened. And I want to thank the Gates foundation for stepping in big with support, it’s just the sort of thing uncle Bill would have wanted.”

Plans apparently include creating a special wing of “The History of Schools Museum” for this last chapter of the story, the rise and fall of the Online Schools, covering roughly the period between 2000 and 2012. Jobs Jr, said Youtube videos of the Las Cruces School District school board meetings will run continuously on the giant wall screen in the Museums Entrance to “give visitors some idea what the whole school thing was all about.

“That this particular school district was the very last to exist in America is a back handed complement of course. But we do want to preserve the record. After all, even today, many can hardly recall that period in American Society, and few wish to dredge up the dismal failures of those institutions. We think it’s important for the young people coming up, and for posterity, that we never forget the colossal mistakes that were made in those days.”

Just what did go wrong? How were trillions of dollars wasted in project that had the best of intentions? I asked Jobs Jr that question.

“You know, it’s funny you should ask. I’ve always been curious about that, ever since it became so obvious that schools were obsolete. I used to ask my dad, when he was alive, and he’d get going on stories about the Apple II and how hypertalk was going to revolutionize education. He’d ramble on and go off on something about his feud with uncle Bill, but eventually he’d come to a halt, shake his head, and admit he never could quite figure out why it didn’t.”

I asked Jobs Jr, if he ever reached a resolution with his dad over the intervention and take over of Apple that Jobs Jr staged some years ago now.

“Well, that certainly was a tough one. My dad wanted to leave the patents of his legacy, especially his favorite baby the iAll, to the Federation of Americas Teachers. You know… FAT. The board and I strongly suspected if that happened this terrific technology that enabled true learning with no instructors at all, and completely outside the models of school buildings and the whole thing, would just have been buried by FAT. Never seen the light of day. I just couldn’t let that happen. To this day, it was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, but you do what you think is right. I got hammered in the press at the time if you recall.”

That was certainly true. Mr. Jobs Jr. was the subject of a series of personal attacks including a bombing of his Beemermobile, the perpetrators of which were never identified. How did he manage to turn it all around to the point where his company Omni Community is the largest social network in the world and it’s tie in the iAll Mark II brain chip has over 75% of the market?

“Oh, so you never heard the story? I thought everybody had. It’s in my morgue. But you reporters are always after a “live” bit aren’t you? Tired of reruns of everything. Okay, as far as our company was able to piece it together, the idea really got going in a tiny cohort of people taking a class called CEL 460/560…some obscure part of NMSU I think it was called. Somehow the idea got going in this group that learning was something that just occurred in schools by accident. It wasn’t the schools at all.”

Really, people didn’t know that before this group, I thought to myself? I nudged Steve JR, just to see if he was actually here with me and not jacking off into the ethernet with his brain chip. Of course there’s some that say this nudgecheck habit of cyberporters should be banned, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I wanted my live feed.

“Well, I can’t say they were the only source, but clearly one source. In any event, once they posted their “Learning is community, Community is learning” manifesto the game was up. At least that was the thinking of myself, and a group of venture caps as well. It was thinking far ahead of it’s time, but if you grokked it, you just knew where the future was going to turn for learning. And it wasn’t going to be the schools. I mean, sure they tried to move online, and sort of rebuild their institutions there, but it was hopeless from the beginning.”

How so, hopeless? I asked.

“Dede. When he demonstrated his MUVE to my board, we knew. If learning happened as well in online communities that had nothing to do with schools, then online schools were doomed as well. We just read the trend, and put our R and D to work on Omni Community, and the rest is history. We supplied the instant learning environments to parents, and the schools just couldn’t keep up.

“Truth be told the parents were more than ready for a new model for educating their kids, one that didn’t cost them a treasure, and one that didn’t take the whole matter out of their hands. I mean, do you think there were any school districts that had a clue what the online change was all about? Do you think there were any in FAT, or in school administration, that understood about giving the community back control over their children’s lives? It was a walk in the park competing with that group.”

Didn’t the online schools use the new tools too? I asked Jobs, but I knew the answer.

“Sure they used some of the tools, but they just couldn’t relinquish control. They had their own pedagogy built up by years and years of working away in their isolated ivory towers, or where-ever they did it…personally I’ve never seen an ivory tower myself. They had no way to let go, to let it happen.

“That reminds me, we put that story about Pidgin in everyone’s brain chip at Omni. It flashes every 10 days into the news buffer. The story goes: You put people who speak two different languages into a room. Neither understands the other’s language. Eventually they spontaneously learn to communicate in some new third language. How does this happen? I’ll tell you, it’s that the incomplete knowledge brings about collaboration in learning, and that creates the thing that’s lacking when existing in an information rich environment. The beauty thing, an information rich environment is ubiquitous now. Perfect for a social network but death for pedagogy. Simple as that.”

Jobs Jr reached up and code tapped the side of his head, and I knew that was the end of the interview. But it had gone out live to millions, and my gameboy bucks were climbing as I deconned the feed, and checked the stat bank. Truly a historic day.

Social Networks Bleed Green or ‘ed? Or both?

Yet another Good resource Gary.

Suggests, amongst many interesting ideas: Clearly an interesting idea that businesses might revision themselves as “social networks online”. What does it mean when businesses see themselves as social networks? I guess it means social has to include business as a subset of it’s functions. A real town center is a mashup of social and business. Malls an attempt to recreate that in a new context of controlled environment. Pyramid organizations such as Amway, recreate both the social and the business world combined in a new controlled way, that exists in a real distributed space offline, has a lot of online social networking characteristics. And there are many business/social online networks already.

All of which stimulates me to speculate that:

PKE model is a online social network for a pre existing offline social network, so to speak. It recreates online some of what exists in the regional community offline… while at the same time allowing the kind of reshuffling of social connections and specialization of groupings that online “social networking” makes possible.

It also creates institutional online functions as taking place within an online social networking community. A combination of official and social functions in a new “mashup” of the two. And melds into the mix learning and training activities as well, which take on aspects of social networking in the online world. In a sense, just one more resource amongst many that social networks will be “providing”, or that those who seek out social networks will be looking for.

Educational institutions as they move online will be social networks that mashup educational functions with official institutional functions. So why not mashup with the larger PKE network as well, and recreate themselves as community resources in a larger sense, and share resources and connectivity and “audience/customers” between town and gown.

One can apparently get carried away with the idea of mashup….=^) But on the other hand, that’s probably the best word yet to describe the online world. One big mashup of functions and uses.

So, PKE is a connection/ground between the existing real world social networks, the existing institutional quasi social networks… and online counterparts that extend the social network model into the official business interactions as well. And it forms a onlilne social network OF regional institutions.

All part of a redefinition of “jobs” and “hats” and “who are you really working for, can you tell anymore?” that I think online communities are going to bring about. Rather than the institutions “reforming” in dramatic steps, I see that their employees, and their functions will BLEED into other institutions and social networks, and online communities… to the point where functions and roles will become ever harder to sort out. And one day, people will wake up, and truly be confused about who they are “working for”.

Or so it seems to me this morning.

Gatekeepers Lament JohnG

This might foul up the works a tad, as I’m an integrator and I’m also a multipurpose iconoclast. So I hope at times it might be hard to tell which devil I was advocating for. Or whose calf is getting gored and served up cajun style BBQ.

Actually, I’m prejudiced towards the devil we don’t know as opposed to the devil we do. I prefer the former to the latter. Bring on the change, and then let’s do the party cleanup later. And I’m also willing to just route around devils altogether. Can’t we just be joyful adventurers on the path, working according to our best lights, and singing a happy song, while the devils do whatever they do off in their very own Mordor? We get what we create in our minds, so why even think about creatures with pointy tales, and nasty habits? Isn’t the best way to deal with trolls, just to ignore them, don’t give it energy? Yeah, I thought so! (adamant debating points here).

There’s fear and loathing nonetheless in the present situation of educational institutions, because a gigantic tidal wave is on the move, coming right towards them (us?). No one knows what the landscape will look like after it arrives. And if it is ever “going away” once it gets here.

Ya ever notice that so many of those ancient cities were just built over again, probably with some new bells and whistles, but using the bricks and stones and rocks that had been there before in a previous architectural manifestation. Things fell apart, or were taken apart, but often, there was a desire to rebuild something there again. So they did.

Or occasionally everyone went away, and never came back, and the place was just ruins for ever after.
I think that’s the heart of the matter when it comes to the changes OTL will bring to educational institutions, or that educational institutions will bring to OTL. As far as goals, I think there’s a general agreement on avoiding the “ruins for ever after scenario”. We all have at least some part of our attention focused on who’s gaining, and we’re all wondering if we can, as a country, run any faster and stay ahead.

But it’s how we get there, and what we are willing to change to get there, what we are willing to accept that’s different… that will decide if we get there or not. I’m going out on a limb here and suggest it’s going to require/inspire a lot of change from all parties including perhaps an awareness that the distinctions between the parties are less important than the similarities.

I think we all will begin to see institutions in new ways, and the relationship and participation of individuals both within and ACROSS the boundaries will change dramatically. It’s that kind of changing awareness of interests and self identification with larger entities that brings upon unexpected sudden swings in how power is exercised, by who, and for what goals.

In other words, bureaucracies are, as we know from eastern europe and elsewhere, paper tigers. They can look invincible one moment, but as soon as those who allege fidelity to them see themselves as part of something entirely different, the power goes away overnight. People decided it was just so much more cool to be citizens with certain inalienable rights. And even the leaders of the old power structures could kind of see their point, they lost heart in supporting totalitarianism. It just was collectively not cool any more, and people as a group, identified themselves as part of something else. So the old thing went away in the night. Yeah, I thought so! (more adamant debating here). Okay, if there’s another outside power hanging around, they can delay the process for a number of years, but eventually…

In this case, educational bureaucracies have enormous gate keeping functions. They accredit, or don’t accredit large numbers of those entering our work forces. A college degree is generally thought to be an indicator of future success in a career. Although this gate keeping function is known to have some gaps where the undocumented sneak through and find success somehow… nonetheless the general model of educational institutions turning out value added product for the economy is widely accepted. The huge sums of money devoted to the educational machine in it’s official manifestations speaks to the acceptance of the gate-keeping role they maintain for themselves.

But here’s a question. What if there was a competing or parallel way that people could be qualified, or accredited to be ready to join the workforce? What if it was turning out demonstrably better “product”? Wouldn’t it gradually erode the predominance of the old model, especially if people really really didn’t like the old model? Wouldn’t some of the leaders and some of the rank and file of the old model decide to switch sides.

What would happen then? Would some of the gatekeeping function inevitably move away from their control to a new less defined world of accreditation? Perhaps a new model of simply demonstrating competence on the job? Would the gate keeping function cease forever more to be under the ownership of the status quo educational institutions who would then wither because of lack of resources? Will new institutions develop using the same bricks and stones (teachers?), in the same place, and with a new bureaucracy that will control OLLC and OTL? Probably something like that, but maybe a lot more centered in the private sector.

Or will the status quo institutions somehow co-opt the new OTL, and crush opposition, and keep the whole pie to themselves?

Powers that be, will try to hold on tight. But if I read the economy correctly, that just ain’t going to work, because either we produce knowledge workers that succeed, or we don’t, and if we don’t, there WILL be change no matter who tries to resist.

I talked a bit about this in the previous blog below; it’s actually a continuation of this post, or this is a continuation of that post. Anyway, it’s the same thing with a different emphasis.

That’s why hard: Pidgin, the language of learning and ALL content

Pidgin is what results when you put in one place people who do not share any common language. And there’s no instructor to guide the interaction OR to provide content. So apparently people can learn without any pedagogy at all!! Horrors!!

From Wikipedia:

The creation of a pidgin usually requires:

Prolonged, regular contact between the different language communities
A need to communicate between them
An absence of (or absence of widespread proficiency in) a widespread, accessible interlanguage

So, if somehow people LEARN how to create a new language form for their new situation, that implies that both the ability to interact and the presence of “content” are givens when humans are involved.

Which if true, would seem to indicate that OLC is mostly about showing up in the same place and being open to spontaneously learning what it means to be there. Or in other words, where there’s people there’s capability for interacting, and where there’s people there’s content.

Then the question becomes, what are the goals? Do we have preconcieved notions of what NEEDS to be learned? If so, then the emphasis on interaction or the emphasis on content would be different based on the goals of the particular OLC. Since I would suggest that the goals are going to be suppllied ever more frequently by those actually “in the community”, the decisions on who’s the expert for what part of the interaction will likely be fluid and changing. And in the end, fairly indistinct.

I find myself remembering the “hot tub” model for teacher guidance as described by the Pepperdine OTL professor in her paper from earlier in the course. The teacher gets in the tub with the rest of the students, but still has a guide hat on. I would assume the class knows who is the teacher from either institutional “creditation” or perhaps in a newer model, because they simply demonstrate knowledge and competence in group interaction leadership.

Say one was taking a cooking class. Maybe the knowledge/content would be distributed amongst all the participants, and the “experts” might only drop in from online somewhere for a few moments of participation in the hot tub? Maybe the group would decide to have serveral Different Experts take part. Maybe certain groups would realize that they each had enough expertise that when pooled they TOGETHER comprised an expert.

I think that’s a big insight there folks. As David Winer said, the experts, the content, is out in the audience not up on the stage.

In the end, OTL is probably going to escape the boundaries of institutions with their gatekeeping and disciplinary functions, and move towards the wilder world of “making it in the real world of commerce and street smarts”.

Once that happens OTL costs will come down. Competition and mutliple sources of “education” will push educational services into the marketplace where demand will drive supply which will eventually catch up and drive the cost per experience down. And of course there are those who have said some time ago now that information wants to be free. Will that apply to “education” as well? Distributed models of educational services online will also require new ways of “billing” and new business plans.

John

Doom: Ask not for whom the bell tolls, school bureacracies, it tolls for thee.

Jim,
I keep getting a case of deja vu thinking about this desperate need for educational reform stuff. Could it really be 30+ years later and the same conversation?

Well, no it’s not the same conversation because powerful new technology has arrived that holds the promise of both universal access, and customization to individual student’s learning styles.

You are oh so correct to point out that any roll out of this technology by a heavily centralized bureacracy is doubtful as to outcome, because as you point out the centralization has been one of the chief means by which education has “gone wrong”.

What might be different this time, is that online stuff tends to escape top down control. You understand the power of the open source model, and OTL could get away from big institutions and fall into the hands of a broader based, wilder, untamed group of do it yourselfers. For example, there’s all the home schoolers out there, and they tend to be geographically dispersed…as an interest group they transcend school districts and state boundaries. A fire is probably already burning there for OTL stuff.

Also, this time around, there’s the charter schools. They have more local mass, but share some of the outside the boundaries interests that home schoolers have. I’m sure there are charter schools looking around right now for ways to “collaborate” with other charter schools to develop OTL capabilities.

And then there’s the reality that online education model actually fits better into a ONLINE COMMUNITY, then it does into most of the old models for educational instittutions. The strong economic need to turn out, as Dede says, knowledge workers, is creating a parallel universe of educational opportunities, that will blow up in the next few years, and astonish us.

It wasn’t enough to reform education because that was the right thing to do, in the past. Not enough juice to counter institutional centrifigal forces. But now, there’s the killer app technology that has already established at least a commercially viable parallel world that is ripe for educational “exploitation” =^) PLUS the strong, strong strong economic needs for turning out knowledge workers that can compete in world markets. So it’s a two pronged change machine, and it can’t be stopped.

Which is why there will be a lot of transitional chaos, and that means places for people like you and me and RETA gang etc to make a difference. It’s incomplete knowledge, and we have to collaborate to come up with both the questions and the answers. Yeah, that ABQ school district bus is going to the end of the line and it’s not coming back, so we have the opportunity to start our own bus line, with destination “Further”.

And the only thing that’s really important is if one is on the bus, or off the bus.

Clearly everyone here is ON the bus. And in my experience there’s many many people who have the passion for bus riding but no bus to get on.

Written on the wind

Las Crucen Little Coches Packerds, 69, said she took a glass-half-full perspective on the wind.

“My grandfather, who was Native American, would always say there’s stories on the wind, and if you listen, you can hear the spirits talk,” she said. “That was his philosophy, and I think it’s a good one because it kind of takes your mind off the dust blowing.”

I wonder if this philosophy can work for OTL, where there’s issues of forms homework assignments that might be seen as the dust blowing…count technical snafus also… And somewhere, if one can hear well, there’s the message, the story, the spirit talk.

Wikipedia the example of collabortive, distributed, incremental knowledge

Reading a good article in the New Yorker that discusses Wikipedia history and processes.

It truly is one giant collaborative effort, and it’s worth noting how that collaborative effort is structured, how it works and how it doesn’t work. Because it’s a model for other collaborative building online. For example in creating something like SOL and PKE, are there parts that can be constructed in a fairly free collaborative method? The model uses volunteer work from as many individuals as possible. In the case of Wikipedia it accumulated moderate efforts of many individuals into a truly massive accomplishment.

Chris Dede 2

Most of what we do in education is we teach kids to manipulate information, a very industrial age thing, but in mediated situation immersion it’s experiences that are central. You start BEFORE information, and kids have to figure out which information is important and how you pull it out of the environment. Which is of course what knowledge workers do.

But the knowledge gained can be distributed in the group, and how do we then “get it into the individual” and how do we “test” for it? It’s the accomplishments that determine who won, not, a test…

Kids think about multisensory environment like a toolbox, use whatever gets the job done.
Chris uses 8 tools for his Harvard distributed learning class.

Based on experience and it’s based on collaboration as opposed to based on information and based on individual accomplishment.

Also this issue of co-design, kids see these media as expressive. They don’t just want to have experiences, they want to shape these experiences.

Hey hey, Chris finally gets around to talking about Marshall Mcluhan!! Who I’ve been chatting up in these discussions in various places. Sez a lot of Mcluhan is still very relevant today. Media shape their messages. Media shape their participants. Media enable their participants. Infrastructure shapes civilization.

Chris Dede

Can’t believe I’m actually the first to post in group one. Guess I should enjoy it while it lasts…

Chris Dede =terrific!!! I’m so glad I didn’t have to discuss Hargreaves, who I found insufferably smug, like he was the first to discover that social justice is a tough nut to crack. But anyway, we instead have Chris to talk about, who is extremely knowledgeable and very accessible, and not in the least smug or arrogant. Not that I agree with everything Dede says…

And this idea of getting a cheap podcast of the latest and greatest teaching ideas fresh from a recent conference is a real winner too. Kind of like how magazines have faster turn around then books so their ideas are more up to date, and then how internet ideas have even shorter turn around, and are even more up to date. So, eventually books will only be useful for ideas that don’t change much over time.

Anyway, here’s some notes from Chris’s talk. Stuff I found intriguing. Kind of like an annotated bibilography, except for a podcast. And a bit longer…

1) Trying to sort out what sort of students we want to “turn out” to fit global marketplace/economy.

2) Methods are changing because of tech innovations rapidly progressing.

3) Students of all ages are changing too, what students do outside of classes is much more like what Knowledge Workers do than what happens inside the classrooms.

Learning Styles: different sensory emphasis, some more visual some more auditory, kinesthetic/ symbolic, personality shapes your learningm, whether you are extrovert or introvert shapes collaborative learning, multiple intelligences and the aptitudes we bring to learning. In groups we throw out a bit to each group which doesn’t fit anyone.

However, media based instruction, fits a group that is selected by the fact that they use media, which tends to create a similar learning style. It’s not age necessarily because it’s really what media one is used to, and how much media one is using that tends to create a similar group.

What knowledge workers do is take incomplete, inconsistent possibly biased sources of information and synthesizing them together. KW also involves pretty sophisticated multitasking. Example of Cisco manager that uses instant messaging to get immediate information when in a meeting from somewhere else in the company, which is very effective, but others in the company are messaging here for other reasons when she’s in a meeting, so now, she’s in two spaces at the same time, and she’s about to have a nervous breakdown. If it gets up to too many meetings at once, I’m going to be useless in all of them because of the cognitive overload.

It’s good that my daughter is learning what knowledge workers are doing, though she’s learning these outside the classroom.

Personal expression is now also part of learning, where people put together their own personal media, whether created or just a pastiche.

Life is distributed now. All learning will be distributed. Just part of how life works.

The “World to the Desktop” will be joined by two other models next ten years: going to reshape media based learning styles, and working styles…

Alice in wonderland interface, multi user virtual environment, fully immersed into a virtual world as a digital world from a desktop. Other is connection of virtual spaces with real life, as one walks around one has wireless connectivitiy so one can infuse the virutal world throughout the real world. Ubiquitous computing.

These two interfaces will become a large part of the future learning environment.

Kids like massively multiplayer online games. Have evolved into a lot of different types of “worlds” that appeal to a broad set of age levels, gender etc.
1)These games are VERY engaging.
2(The learning processes are excellent, just what we would want to see. Guided learning by doing, apprenticship and mentoring, collaborative learning, active learning.
3) The content by and large is GARBAGE, or worse, pathological

Wonderful engine for learning in games. Engaging, good processes that’s communicating crap.

Chris doesn’t like the keeping score model, not that enthused about entertainment as learning…where’s the research? Has with his colleagues and grants from NSF come up with a virtual place called River city for academic content and higher order thinking skills like sophisticated inquiry and experimental design. Has curriculum associated with it. Multi User Virtual Environment.

What Occurred to me: this is very important to a collaborative community: Have EVERYTHING in ONE PLACE… we presently in Cel 460 have stuff all over the place…and we’ve lost contact with each other to a certain extent. For example, I’m posting like crazy at Near Time, but nobody else wants to be there. I’m overwhelming what the other students want to do. And/or, it’s just too hard for many of them, and they gave up in frustration….

One of the skills taught in River City is problem finding, as compared with problem solving…
We’re living in a time that’s unique in history, there aren’t any precedents…we’re encountering things we haven’t seen before and trying to understand how to “frame” this as a problem…

Dede says the technology doesn’t do anything, it’s just a catalyst, what makes it work is the pedagogy. Well, Mcluhan would beg to differ, because technology DOES do something. The medium is the message…is what it does. Now that’s not everything, but it sure is “doing something”.

Powerful model is forming a learning community. No one is the expert, no one is the novice, everyone brings knowledge to the table. We all see different parts of the elephant. Together we synthesize meaning about what this complex entity is.

Mediated, situated, immersion. Using situated Learning and learning communities to try to leverage the power of new media.

Reaches kids that are failing. Hmmm. MUVE reaches kids that are failing. HMMMM.

Build things that speak to their learning styles and strengths. Learning is incredibly diverse. We need to rethink how we think about learning. We’re not even up to eating as far as the choices we provide to learners. Learning is at least as complex as bonding, which is very diverse.

Ubiquitous computing and augmented reality. Dede sez he thinks laptops are too expensive, and he likes the other “smaller” devices such as PDAs, enhanced cell phones etc. This was done obviously before the release of the iPhone…

Dede points out chips are becoming embedded in our lives to the point where they become invisible, creating a world of smart objects and intelligent contexts. Augmented realities. Handheld wireless device that is location aware, meaning that it has a GPS in it. “Mystery” at MIT, teams of students use mobiles to interact with each other, their real environment, and a virutal environment overlayed on top of real environment.

Smart cellphones are going to win the convergence battle.

well, this is as far as I got before I had to go…so I want to “publish” now…while it’s fresh…but Dede still has about 10 minutes to go, so I’ll post a second time for rap up.

Discussion ‘Tude’: Manifesto Rulz

From a email posted in OTL class discussions today:

Don’t believe it there will be five extra points given for discussions that are not typical question response. All my responses are not typical question and response, and I don’t get any extra credit. Except in heaven, where it counts. =^) Which brings up the whole topic of what IS a typical response, and is that appropriate for online classes.

So here is a post that is not typical of the kind we have been seeing around here for a while. It’s not canned answers, it’s provocative and begs new questions.

Which allows me to touch on something that’s bothering me about this course. For all it’s hipness, parts seem awfully rote. The grade points stuff reminds me of the going through the motions of fitting one’s interest into the prefab and limited blinders of pro forma activities. Give the teacher what they want to hear to get the points. I might go as far as to say, if it can be graded by points in this way, it can’t be about OTL.

These discussion questions and responses, are not the way I would imagine keeping the students in this class actively engaged, and excited about what they are doing and looking forward to doing the work.

Maybe it’s me, maybe I don’t think systematically enough, in little bits and pieces that all fit into a bigger piece, and then a bigger piece. Maybe it’s my learning style, which I prefer to describe as ad hoc. Follow the interest, the excitement, the wonder, it will take one where one needs to go. Especially online where one can go anywhere one wants to go. And where there is ALWAYS somewhere to go for an online discussion.

Or maybe critical thinking rubric is NOT the way to encourage a lively engaged student interaction. My model for collaboration would involve people finding their own voice, and going with it, speaking from their own experience, using their imagination, expressing the way they personally feel about it, sharing by posting links and bits of stuff they came across in their surfing, and reading. Let it be spontaneous at least a little bit, and throw out all the stuff about giving the teacher what the teacher wants in the way the teacher wants it.

Site a book by including where it’s published? I’d rather have a link to the Amazon page, or just google the title.

Annotated Bibliography? Isn’t that what a blog is? And anyway, you can google that too. Are we studying how to be professional grad students, or learning by our own immersion how students are actually going to learn in the class? If students are multitasking when they are online, then the online rubric has got to compete with all of that for interest and energy and learning possibility.

Clearly, people love to communicate, which is what an online discussion is. Seems to me that we have to realize that discussion is taking place in a different world than the old static classroom. I’d go as far as to suggest that a “non academic” paradigm for discussion is going to rule in the coming world. A discussion that involves more of the whole person, includes pieces that appear to be off topic, and thinking that may, or may not involve all the critical thinking rubric.

Because, it’s all connected. The academic model of taking everything apart into separate disciplines has had it’s day. It’s time to start putting things back together. As Pepperdine paradigm would have it, “Everyone into the virtual hot tub”.

Community Agreement: the legal/social contract?

Here’s what one finds when one studies the agreement that the WELL site provides for it’s all paying memebers…

The WELL Member Agreement
YOYOW is the nickname for the following bit of enigmatic prose, coined by WELL co-founder Stewart Brand, and now an essential element of WELL culture: “You Own Your Own Words.”

Eventually this evolved into the following more precise document, agreed to by all WELL Members.

This document is an agreement between The WELL and its members. It concerns the legal framework in which you participate on The WELL, what your rights and responsibilities are and what you can expect from The WELL.

The WELL’s Rights and Responsibilities

The WELL is not the publisher or author of any works posted by its members. It is a passive service for storage and dissemination of the works that WELL members may choose to post and distribute via The WELL. WELL management does not screen works before they are posted, and no prior approval is required for posting. The WELL disclaims all copyright and ownership in such works and all responsibility for them.

Although it cannot make an absolute guarantee of system security, The WELL takes reasonable steps to maintain security. If you have reason to believe system security has been breached, contact WELL staff for help.

If WELL technical staff finds that files or processes belonging to a member pose a threat to the proper technical operation of the system or to the security of other members, The WELL reserves the right to delete those files or to stop those processes. If WELL technical staff suspects an account is being used by someone who is not authorized by the account holder, The WELL may temporarily disable that account in order to preserve system security. In all such cases, The WELL will contact the member as soon as feasible.

The WELL appoints hosts for its Featured Conferences. However, hosts have a great deal of autonomy in setting policies for and running their conferences. Hosts are not acting as agents of WELL management in making such decisions, in the absence of explicit agreements to the contrary, nor are they subcontractors or employees of The WELL. For more information about the relationship between hosts and The WELL, see the WELL Hosts Agreement, available in the Hosts conference.

The WELL reserves the right to refuse service to anyone and to cancel an account at any time.

The WELL is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind. The WELL will not be liable for incidental or consequential damages at all or for other damages beyond the normal base membership fee for one calendar quarter.

Your Rights and Responsibilities as a WELL Member and Poster

You are legally and ethically responsible for any works – writings, files, pictures, or any other work – that you post or transmit using any of The WELL’s services: email, conferencing, the World Wide Web, USENET, the MUSE, or any other service that allows interaction or dissemination of information. In posting works on The WELL, you are responsible for honoring the rights of others, including intellectual-property rights (copyright, patent, and trademark), the right to privacy, the right not to be libeled or slandered. For example, if you wish to post a copyrighted work on The WELL, you are responsible for obtaining the copyright holder’s permission first.

Under US law, you retain copyright on all works you create and post to The WELL, unless you choose specifically to renounce it. In posting a work on a service offered by The WELL, you authorize other members who have access to that service to make personal and customary use of the work, including creating links to or reposting among WELL-only conference areas to which the author has access, but not otherwise to reproduce or disseminate it unless you give permission for such dissemination. You also give permission to The WELL to copy your works as part of the normal backup process, and to conference hosts to archive topics containing your works. You have the right to remove any of your works from The WELL at any time.

Illegal activity under the laws of California and the United States using your WELL account is a violation of this agreement. Since the law as to jurisdiction of online systems is unsettled, we urge you to consider the possible effect of laws outside The WELL’s locality or your own residence. The WELL is open to members worldwide (and works published on the World Wide Web, Usenet, or other such services are accessible to anyone on the Internet), and The WELL cannot guarantee that you won’t run into legal trouble from other jurisdictions over your works.

Your Responsibilities as a WELL Member and Reader

You agree to provide your real name when signing up as a WELL member. The WELL normally does not permit anonymous or pseudonymous accounts. Exceptions to this general rule require special arrangements with WELL management.

If you have a complaint about the behavior or posts of another member, it is your responsibility to attempt to resolve the conflict, typically by contacting that person directly. If that doesn’t help, and your complaint is about interactions or material in a specific conference, you should also feel free to contact that conference’s host for help. Normally, WELL staff will not take a role in mediating conflicts between you and other members. The WELL does not take responsibility for your behavior or that of other members of the system. However, a WELL member has the right to expect not be bothered by others against his or her will. For this reason, utilities exist on The WELL to deny access via private communication from individuals or the public at large. You can install these protections at any time, or contact WELL staff for help. You agree not to attempt to bypass these protections if installed by another member.

Your access to the works that members have posted on The WELL is for your personal use only. If you want to redistribute works you find on The WELL, it is your responsibility to obtain permission from the poster (and any other person with rights in the material).

You agree to pay all charges that accrue to your account through your use or the use of those authorized by you. You take responsibility for all authorized use of your WELL account, and for all contributions to any service offered by The WELL that you post from your WELL account.

You agree to help protect your account and the security of other members by guarding your password. If you have reason to believe your password has been compromised or there has been any unauthorized use of your account, contact WELL staff as soon as possible.

You agree not to use the system for illegal activity or for violating the privacy or security of other members.

You may cancel your account at any time by contacting The WELL Billing Department. If you cancel your account, you are responsible for paying the monthly membership fees through the last day of your current billing cycle as well as any surcharges for system use through the date of cancellation. Disputed charges must be reported to The WELL within 60 days.

The WELL reserves the right to change the terms of this agreement. There is a conference called policy where issues around changes to this agreement may be discussed from time to time. You are invited to give your input through a discussion with WELL members in that conference.

The WELL may assign and delegate its rights and obligations to any successor to all or part of its business or assets.

This agreement supersedes all other agreements or understandings regarding this subject matter, and is governed by the internal laws of the United States and California.

another OLC hype intro

Join the fastest growing online community of education and training professionals!

LearningTimes.org is an open community for education and training professionals. Members have free access to a wide range of opportunities to interact and network with peers from across the globe. Member activities include live webcasts and interviews with industry leaders, online debates and discussions, live coverage of industry conferences, and international working groups.

The LearningTimes.org community also features free group collaboration tools, such as virtual meeting rooms, a site-wide instant messenger, and virtual office suites, making it a vital place on the web for thousands of education professionals to meet and interact at any time.

Connects youth

another day another site. This one says hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month. Begging the question what is a unique visitor.

TakingITGlobal.org is an online community that connects youth to find inspiration, access information, get involved, and take action in their local and global communities. It is now the world’s most popular online community for young people interested in making a difference, with hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month.

TIG’s highly interactive website provides a platform for expression, connection to opportunities, and support for action. Join now and connect with thousands of other young people around the world!

What Does an Elearning Community look like?

More stuff that an online elearning community does…

LearningTimes explores themes of interest to learning professionals during interactive webcasts, live online workshops and working group meetings. Some of the topics covered to date are listed in the Archive area.

LearningTimes produces and sponsors free podcasts exploring learning, technology, and collaboration. Audio programs foster continued discussion among members of the community. See some recent podcasts, see some of our program guests, or check out NCQ Talk.

LearningTimes provides free, live coverage from industry conferences. In this excerpt from an audio and photo “blog”, Jonathan Finkelstein covers the largest annual museum conference (AAM) from an educator’s perspective.

LearningTimes helps produce multi-day online conferences for education professionals. The recent Illinois Online Conference featured a special online “learner roundtable”, co-moderated by Dan Balzer of the 21st Century Information Fluency Project at IMSA.

“Global Collaboration Grant” recipients are engaged in meaningful learning-related projects within LearningTimes, where they use the community’s tools to collaborate with colleagues around the globe.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton accepted an Innovations in Information Services Award from LearningTimes. Clinton also appeared on a live LearningTimes panel webcast on the needs of “non-traditional students”.

LearningTimes recognizes excellence in learning-related activities, and supports numerous collaborative learning projects across the globe, including support for the NMC Online Conference on Visual Literacy.

Conversation with Amy Jo Kim

Amy Jo Kim said 7 years ago…

What’s going on with online community is not fundamentally different from what is going on with community in the physical world, and which has been going on for thousands of years. I’m driven by looking at the history of sustainable communities. It is different in ways that have to do with tools, the lack of sensory data, and the anonymity. However the dynamics and the business models are identical. Communities that are sustainable have a sustainable business model behind them. Most of the “communities for the sake of being communities,” communes are the most obvious example, couldn’t last and they didn’t last for a good reason. The business wasn’t really what people needed.

For instance, sometimes people get upset if a site puts up a community space and then takes it down. “Oh it’s not there, they don’t care about community.” I’m shocked at that. If a business like a coffee shop down the street opens up, and people start to gather there, and then the shop goes out of business because it wasn’t a viable business model, people complain, but they know that’s the way it works. It’s not an altruistic endeavor. Companies are in business as long as it makes sense to them. So the problem is not so much companies going in an out of business, but expectation management. People have these expectations that there is some kind of altruism that goes along with community, or that just because you put up a free space, people squat there, that they have the right to keep squatting there.

What people need is to connect with other people around the activities that are an everyday piece of their lives. Not just around an abstract notion of community.

How many hats does it take before there is NO hat?

Today’s topic: who do we work for? Is institutional identity something important for institutions to jealously guard? Increase their borders, deepen their definition? Or is there something about all the different functions, “Hats” that many people wear who work in institutions that is in fact a new expanded sense of relation, a de facto community of interests where it becomes hard to say what narrow interest one is actually working for?

Here in Las Cruces, I run into so many people that have more than one hat that they are wearing, and I wonder, if one asked them seriously, could they break up their “work” into separate parts, or do they experience everything they do as part of one thing? And even if they don’t experience it that way, upon reflection, could it be seen that way? Do the mailouts done by the HTC POI that talk about events sponsored by say the Chamber or MVEDA or NMSU departments, or Arrowhead or Spaceport events etc, serve only one master? Fulfill only one goal? Yes, if the goal is public service, defined as what is generally good for the community as a whole.

So I guess my point is, has a community of interrelations already arisen using online tools whereby people are empowered to work under more than one “umbrella” organization at one time? And if so, if they are working for multiple organizations goals, then who are they working for? An invisible organization called public service…I propose. Some form of connections that becomes more and more real, until it seems to surpass the parts that people used to identify with, the institutions as separte entities acting on their own.

This new body of connections, theoretically enabled by online communication and other tools, grows and grows until one day it simply takes over everything from within. Voila! Public Knowledge Exchange.

A visionary Meeting…

Get some interesting people in a room, and eventually, something interesting will happen. Perhaps this is the basic rule of online communities as well. Or maybe there’s a need for a catalyst. Something that turns inchoate presence into interactive presence.

Any converstation that manages to touch on chaos theory has something going for it. Yesterday, Dr. Kevin Boberg, CEO of Arrowhead Center, and I, and Julia Parra, Dawn Hommer, and Huong Phan, met for an hour of discussion that was purportedly my presentation on understanding PKE, for the hard core insiders. Due to technical difficulties the planned powerpoint presentation did not take place. And as I attempted to sort of read off the laptop and “project manually” I got kind of bogged down in a question asked by Dawn re would institutions really benefit by standardization of form filling out at PKE? At some point I did manage to mention there’s a paradox between standardization and customization, and Boberg later picked up that. Julia said something about online communities being a coming thing, and, I started to improvise a response to Dawn, and left the presentation behind all together.

What followed was an often passionate, and often visionary conversation about online communities, needs of NMSU in various aspects that might fit a newer interactive communication model, the problelms of valuation for Venture Capitalists now because value might now be present sort of in the between spaces, the gaps of models, more than the models structure itself. Or something paradoxical like that. How chaos theory applies to “designing online communities” and a lot of other good stuff, including the hard to define but very important quality of community we might refer to as soul. Or caring.

Multi-tasking backlash

– By William Saletan – Slate Magazine
Legislation in New York would ban use of cell phones, iPods, and BlackBerries while crossing the street. Bill text: 1) It shall be a crime to “enter and cross a crosswalk while engaging in the use of an electronic device in a city with a population of one million or more.” 2) “A user of an electronic device who holds such device to, or in the immediate proximity of his or her ear, is presumed to be engaging in the use of said device.” Fine: $100. Rationale: 1) It’ll protect pedestrians and drivers. 2) “It is impossible to be fully aware of one’s own surroundings when occupied in using an electronic device.” Critiques: 1) This legislative idiocy is what happens when you start banning cell phone use while driving and bicycling. 2) Why is it legal to walk while reading a newspaper? 3) Why is it legal to operate your car stereo while driving? 4) “N.Y. senator proposes interfering with natural selection.”

Been hear, seen that

First let me mention that I HAVE been an audio learner for some time, and a video learner for that matter. I bought lectures from “The Teaching Company” on cassette, CD, and VHS, and DVD. I spent hours and hours and hours with these “lectures”. Which, on the receiving end were not too different than downloading a podcast and listening to that on an iPod, because I would use wireless headphones and find a part of the house that I wanted to be in to listen to the lectures. Which weren’t that produced, so very much like a podcast.

I very much liked that I could have access to the quality of this information in an isolated location. I liked that I could listen while I did anything like for example exercise. I liked that I could stop it and rewind if I didn’t understand something. In fact, this was my favorite feature, because no matter what was being said, if I listened to it often enough I could eventually grok it. I could set the volume to a preferred level. I could stop in the middle of a lecture and start again in a few days. All these apply to podcasts and audio tools in general.

The same qualities applied to video pretty much but it was a little less portable. If I was moving around exercising, it was harder to view the video. And because it wasn’t a video iPod it was less portable. But that part is yesterday’s problem. So the advantages of controlling time and place and venue, if you will, were still there. Plus with video, I was able to receive all the additional information available from the lecturer’s facial and body expressions, a considerable extra stream of learning.

I didn’t access these lectures online, I had to order them and wait for snail mail, and they were expensive. Online would likely be cheaper, and of course very fast to download, even video with a broadband connection wouldn’t take absolutely forever. Or shouldn’t very soon now.

One more advantage if you will. It seems to be a little less taxing to listen or watch as opposed to reading and this packaged more passive experience seemed to make it “easier to learn” than reading the same material in a textbook. Of course, with audio we have all the richness of the human voice, which is a lot more information than words on a page.

Personally, I can talk in a “public context” such as a Podcast might be, and have enough experience with that so it’s not intimidating. I have an ability to improvise in real time a stream of thoughts out loud, so I guess that’s a natural for podcast. OF course I suppose some people might use scripted material, and then use their interpretive skills to make it sound “live”.

This could help develop an online community because of the asynchronous feature, and the added richness of human voice communication. Although paradoxically, the more rich the media experience the less the imagination must supply so something is gained but something is lost. For example see silent movies, or black and white photography vs color.

Sound can be a tricky medium because environments for recording in are rarely actually quiet. There’s all kinds of background sounds to hope won’t interfere. And then there’s gaffes and mistakes, and poor enunciation….a good sound recording takes some experience and skill.

And no, I don’t know what words one can and cannot use for Podcasts, because even though it says “casts” I think the FCC cannot control for decency or obscenity.

Community Map?

This is too close to home to pass up. The blogger is having a hard time getting a collaborative map of what they are doing, so she posts a static image, which is kind of small, and a link to a Word document. Here’s what she/he says about it.

A number of folks are actively working in the overlapping arenas of nonprofit social entrepreneurship, elearning, learning games, and web2.0 tools. As I have been discovering this Community, I felt I wanted a MAP. So I could see who we are, and how we are connected. Such a map would be useful to US – to uplift and extend our networked work. Such a map would be useful to our USERS – to follow and benefit from our networked connections. So — I started a MAP. Here’s a static image of what it looks like so far:

What I really want is a WHITEBOARD for us to build this map collaboratively. But I haven’t found one yet. So here’s a link to a collaborative shared document – the good old fashion way. CommunityMap

We can build the map collaboratively, we just can’t SEE it as it evolves. Open the document, use the draw tool, add hyperlinks. (It would be so much more FUN if we could see it — but for now, maybe this is better than nothing. One of us will figure out how to enable us to see it )

Those of us who work to engage Web2.0 tools and use these tools to promote social good — are ourselves a Learning Community. We are learning how to use these tools ourselves; how to promote the use of these tools within the nonprofit community to do more good better. The more we can learn about and from one another, the more effective we will be in our common work.

Elearners respond favorably to, and increasingly expect, visual presentation of content and graphical, as opposed to text-based, interaction. Yet, many of the Web2.0 ways for connecting and organizing learning networks are text-based. For example, Technorati or Del.icio.us tags and folksonomies. Via tagging systems, we can find like-minded folks who are working in related areas — but the connections are represented by words.

I believe our effort to work together more effectively would be greatly aided by a similar grassroots collaboratively built VISUAL system of connecting and a VISUAL representation of who we are and what we do.

What Does an Elearning Community look like?

From Elearning blog. A class does a group whiteboard, and the teach reads the scribbles. Perhaps as someone comments, you had to be there. Which I suppose is part of the online experience of community, if you don’t have the extra context of knowing the participants in some way, then is going to miss some of what the experience was like for those who do have a “history” together.

“One of my all time favorite images. This image was constructed synchronously and collaboratively by a cohort of online learners — and well nigh ‘furiously’ I might add. Along with the Chat running below the whiteboard image – running so fast and so far to the right that you couldn’t keep up.

The starter image presented was the intersecting circles inside the box. Representing the interaction among ‘course’ content, other learners, external resources, etc. Clearly – the elearners are saying most of the learning takes place outside the box. Most of the learning takes place is unstructured ways. The learning process goes back and forth among content, other learners, external resources along unpredictable, often frustrating, definitely nonlinear pathways. Learning one thing leads to another question leads to another learning…and sometimes to something concrete you can put in another box.

I’ve shared this image with a few other people – they don’t even think its interesting, let alone feel the powerful emotions and insights expressed in this imaage. Now that its static and preserved – so much of what it really means is gone – and we can only get that back if/when we do it again. When we got done making this picture — I absolutely had to preserve it — I was on such a euphoric high over what we had just made together.

What have your experiences been with elearning communities?

What have you captured with regard to what they look like, how they work, how it feels to be a part of such a community? “

Unconference

From Davd Winer blog: on turning the panelists into the audience and vice versa:

Once you’re in you’re spoiled. I’ve heard it said many times, by people who had a real unconference experience, that they can never sit in a dark room, with their hands folded, waiting for the Q&A period, listening to a PowerPoint presenter drone on and on, while the heads bob up and down and a dull roar of enthusiastic discussion can be heard in the distance, in the hallway.

I’m sure there are other structures that work, basically any way of organizing a discussion that involves the minds and expertise of all the people in the room will work. We’ve drifted far from the ideal, so it’s very easy to improve on the normal conference experience. Yet this year, most of us will go to conferences that make minimal use of the experience of the people who participate. It’s a shame, a big revolution is possible here, one as big as the changes that have been brought about by blogging and podcasting. It turns out the exact same principles can be applied to face-to-face conferences, with outstanding results.

Moodle Philosophy

From Moodle Docs
Good discussion about Constructivism and Constructionism, and Social Constructivism. and….

The design and development of Moodle is guided by a particular philosophy of learning, a way of thinking that you may see referred to in shorthand as a “social constructionist pedagogy”. (Some of you scientists may already be thinking “soft education mumbo jumbo” and reaching for your mouse, but please read on – this is useful for every subject area!)
This page tries to explain in simple terms what that phrase means by unpacking four main concepts behind it. Note that each of these is summarising one view of an immense amount of diverse research so these definitions may seem thin if you have read about these before.

If these concepts are completely new to you then it is likely that these ideas will be hard to understand at first – all I can recommend is that you read it carefully, while thinking about your own experiences of trying to learn something.

Constructivism

This point of view maintains that people actively construct new knowledge as they interact with their environment.
Everything you read, see, hear, feel, and touch is tested against your prior knowledge and if it is viable within your mental world, may form new knowledge you carry with you. Knowledge is strengthened if you can use it successfully in your wider environment. You are not just a memory bank passively absorbing information, nor can knowledge be “transmitted” to you just by reading something or listening to someone.

This is not to say you can’t learn anything from reading a web page or watching a lecture, obviously you can, it’s just pointing out that there is more interpretation going on than a transfer of information from one brain to another.

Constructionism

Constructionism asserts that learning is particularly effective when constructing something for others to experience. This can be anything from a spoken sentence or an internet posting, to more complex artifacts like a painting, a house or a software package.

For example, you might read this page several times and still forget it by tomorrow – but if you were to try and explain these ideas to someone else in your own words, or produce a slideshow that explained these concepts, then I can guarantee you’d have a better understanding that is more integrated into your own ideas. This is why people take notes during lectures, even if they never read the notes again.

Social Constructivism

This extends the above ideas into a social group constructing things for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings. When one is immersed within a culture like this, one is learning all the time about how to be a part of that culture, on many levels.
A very simple example is an object like a cup. The object can be used for many things, but its shape does suggest some “knowledge” about carrying liquids. A more complex example is an online course – not only do the “shapes” of the software tools indicate certain things about the way online courses should work, but the activities and texts produced within the group as a whole will help shape how each person behaves within that group.

Connected and Separate

This idea looks deeper into the motivations of individuals within a discussion. Separate behaviour is when someone tries to remain ‘objective’ and ‘factual’, and tends to defend their own ideas using logic to find holes in their opponent’s ideas. Connected behaviour is a more empathic approach that accepts subjectivity, trying to listen and ask questions in an effort to understand the other point of view. Constructed behaviour is when a person is sensitive to both of these approaches and is able to choose either of them as appropriate to the current situation.

In general, a healthy amount of connected behaviour within a learning community is a very powerful stimulant for learning, not only bringing people closer together but promoting deeper reflection and re-examination of their existing beliefs.

Conclusion

Once you are thinking about all these issues, it helps you to focus on the experiences that would be best for learning from the learner’s point of view, rather than just publishing and assessing the information you think they need to know.

It can also help you realise how each participant in a course can be a teacher as well as a learner. Your job as a ‘teacher’ can change from being ‘the source of knowledge’ to being an influencer and role model of class culture, connecting with students in a personal way that addresses their own learning needs, and moderating discussions and activities in a way that collectively leads students towards the learning goals of the class.

Obviously Moodle doesn’t force this style of behaviour, but this is what it is best at supporting. In future, as the technical infrastructure of Moodle stabilises, further improvements in pedagogical support will be a major direction for Moodle development.

Three underlying principles of community design

More from Amy Jo Kim:

The first one is: Design for growth and change. This might sound simple, but watch out, it’s harder than it looks. As a community designer, one of the most damaging mistakes you can make is to over-design your community up front and invest too heavily in a design paradigm or technology platform that can’t easily be changed and updated. Successful, long-lasting communities almost always start off small, simple and focused, and then grow organically over time—adding breadth, depth and complexity in response to the changing needs of the members, and the changing conditions of the environment.

Closely related to this idea is the second principle: Create and maintain feedback loops. Successful community building is a constant balancing act between the efforts of management (that’s you) to plan, organize and run the space, and the ideas, suggestions and needs of your members. To manage this co-evolution, you’ll need to keep your finger on the community pulse — and you’ll do this by creating and maintaining feedback loops between members and management. These loops will keep you in touch with what your members are saying and doing, and give you the information you need to evolve and update your features and platform.

This brings us to the third principle: Empower your members over time. Initially, it’s up to you to define your purpose, choose your feature set, and set a particular tone, but as your community grows and matures, your members can and should play a progressively larger role in building and maintaining the community culture. If you want to grow a large and thriving community, you’ll need to develop a progressive strategy for leveraging the ideas and efforts of your members.

Readings: Nine Timeless Design Strategies

from Amy Jo Kim’s “Community Building on the Web”

Nine Timeless Design Strategies
The book is organized around nine timeless design strategies that characterize successful, sustainable communities. Taken together, these strategies summarize an architectural, systems-oriented approach to community building that I call “Social Scaffolding:”

Define and articulate your PURPOSE

Communities come to life when they fulfill an ongoing need in people’s lives. To create a successful community, you’ll need to first understand why you’re building it and who you’re building it for – and then express your vision in the design, navigation, technology and policies of your community.

Build flexible, extensible gathering PLACES

Wherever people gather together for a shared purpose, and start talking amongst themselves, a community can begin take root. Once you’ve defined your purpose, you’ll want to build a flexible, small-scale infrastructure of gathering places, which you’ll co-evolve along with your members.

Create meaningful and evolving member PROFILES

You can get to know your members – and help them get to know each other – by developing robust, evolving and up-to-date member profiles. If handled with integrity, these profiles can help you build trust, foster relationships, and deliver personalized services – while infusing your community with a sense of history and context.

Design for a range of ROLES

Addressing the needs of newcomers without alienating the regulars is an ongoing balancing act. As your community grows, it will become increasingly important to provide guidance to newcomers – while offering leadership, ownership and commerce opportunities to more experienced members.

Develop a strong LEADERSHIP program

Community leaders are the fuel in your engine: they greet visitors, encourage newbies, teach classes, answer questions, and deal with trouble-makers before they destroy the fun for everyone else. An effective leadership program requires careful planning and ongoing management, but the results can be well worth the investment.

Encourage appropriate ETIQUETTE

Every community has it’s share of internal squabbling. If handled well, conflict can be invigorating – but disagreements often spin out of control, and tear a community apart. To avoid this, it’s crucial to develop some groundrules for participation, and set up systems that allow you to enforce and evolve your community standards.

Promote cyclic EVENTS

Communities come together around regular events: sitting down to dinner, going to church on Sunday, attending a monthly meeting or a yearly offsite. To develop a loyal following, and foster deeper relationships among your members, you’ll want to establish regular online events, and help your members develop and run their own events.

Integrate the RITUALS of community life

All communities use rituals to acknowledge their members, and celebrate important social transitions. By celebrating holiday marking seasonal changes, and integrating personal transitions and rites of passage, you’ll be laying the foundation for a true online culture.

Facilitate member-run SUBGROUPS

If your goal is to grow a large-scale community, you’ll want to provide enabling technologies to help your members create and run subgroups. It’s a substantial undertaking — but this powerful feature can drive lasting member loyalty, and help to distinguish you community from it’s competition

It is not the strongest of species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change. ~Darwin

Quote from Amy Jo Kim’s book on Community Building on the Web:

How is a Web community different than one in the real world? In terms of their social dynamics, physical and virtual communities are much the same. Both involve developing a web of relationships among people who have something meaningful in common, such as a beloved hobby, a life-altering illness, a political cause, a religious conviction, a professional relationship, or even simply a neighborhood or town. So in one sense, a Web community is simply a community that happens to exist online, rather than in the physical world.

But being online offers special opportunities and challenges that give Web communities a unique flavor. The Net erases boundaries created by time and distance, and makes it dramatically easier for people to maintain connections, deepen relationships, and meet like-minded souls that they would otherwise never have met. It also offers a strange and compelling combination of anonymity and intimacy that brings out the best and worst in people’s behavior. It can be near impossible to impose lasting consequences on troublemakers, and yet relatively easy to track an individual’s behavior and purchase patterns—which makes Web communities notoriously difficult to manage. To complicate matters further, the legal issues involving privacy, liability and intellectual property on the Web are just beginning to be addressed, and will evolve rapidly over the next few years.

Although the focus is on Web communities, this book also illuminates deeper and more fundamental aspects of community building – the social and cultural dynamics, the power of a shared purpose, and the roles, rituals and events that bind people together into a group.

Readings:Pepperdine: something old/something new

Something Old, Something New

This paper has examined the elements of the virtual class when the classroom setting is embodied in a virtual world of imagined possibilities, some old and familiar, some new and unusual. Yes, this examination reveals that people can bank on shared metaphors from the real world classroom to negotiate the floor in the online synchronous classroom. But much more importantly, the analyses described here reveal “new” metaphors in the online synchronous classroom that have no analog in the real world teacher education classroom. The virtual blackboard and hot tub objects contribute to important variations in the instructional setting, variations to which students are consciously and unconsciously responsive. The features of the virtual world provide opportunities to realign the “classroom” with the beneficial features of learning in a community.

Decades of research and personal experience in classrooms and formal staff development settings inform real world, face-to-face professional development opportunities for teachers. But knowledge of online learning is extremely limited, and most of the work that has been done is already dated by developments in the online tools themselves. Before diving in to online offerings for professional development of teachers, would-be developers must understand the design features of online learning and how those features affect the sense-making endeavor. This presentation revealed a tiny piece of a tip of an online learning iceberg.

Readings: Pepperdine: Third Places

This discussion is so much like the idea of PKE. A third party, a third place, for community. Neither work nor home.

Oldenburg (1989) bemoans the loss of such informal public spaces in the United States, places like the ubiquitous neighborhood pubs of the U.K. These places that are neither work nor home, are “third places” where people can relax and interact in the relative safety of “regulars” and shared rituals. The lack of third places probably reflects the lack of time people have, or believe they have, to spend in the luxury of idle conversation.

Third places aren’t intended to be places of apprenticeship or learning, but they are intended to serve their local community and its need for affiliation, interaction, and support. If we substitute Wenger’s community of practice for Oldenburg’s local neighborhood as community, we begin to get some ideas about how “place” might matter in a community of practice as well, especially when that practice is a fairly isolated experience in the field.

In considering the role of virtual place as a third place for online communities of practice, it seems rather critical to background the formal traditional classroom and foreground the everyday workplace setting as the context for learning conversation. When students log in to class from home or work, they are participating in discussion as they sit literally submerged in their local context. Teachers logging in to class from home do so from their workspace, surrounded by their student papers, school paperwork, textbooks, grade books, and so on.

Additionally, the virtual world environment allows other kinds of objects to emerge and frame activity in useful ways. As noted above, teachers in the graduate program have their own offices in Tapped In. They may decorate them through description and object construction. For most teachers, this is the only personal office they have and they seem to enjoy it. It is not unusual to log on and find students in their offices, alone, or with one or two colleagues. Now Oldenburg’s third place and those late night coffeehouse conversation become possible.

Readings: Pepperdine virtual worlds

So much good stuff in this article/webpage. It’s at:http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/aera00/47.47/polin/

Virtual worlds support a different kind of place for discourse about work. They succeed because they are able to bring landscapes and objects into play in conversation by harnessing the abounding willingness of participants to imagine together (Bruckman, 1992; Turkle, 1984).

People rely on shared understanding of cultural metaphors from the real world to make sense in the virtual one. Familiar objects like blackboards and hot tubs in the settings for online class allow function as conversational props, signaling and supporting meaning in an otherwise unreal setting. Students and teacher make sense of who they are and what is happening at the moment, based in part upon the cues in the setting.

Readings: Pepperdine new models

I really like this stuff about communities of practice, and the models of learning other than aquisition and storage. So by all means let me aquire and store some stuff here. =^)

Physical settings influence the social interactions that occur in them (Hymes, 1974; Oldenburg, 1989). Consider the adult classroom. Writing tables and chairs exist for the students; it is clear what their main task will be. Moving writing tables into a circle, or hollow square doesn’t over-ride the functional message of the furniture. No one mistakes the U-shaped arrangement of desks for an L-shaped sofa in someone’s home. Whiteboards or blackboards cover two or three walls. These are generally the teacher’s domain, to mark as “important” ideas, notes, or information s/he jots down. No student will be bounding up during class to make a notation on them. No one owns these rooms. There are no personal objects or pictures, except the detritus left by previous groups. There may be a clock; it may work, or not. Off to the corner may be a podium and an overhead projector. Even when not used by an instructor, their very presence indicates the intended direction of conversation in this place. Fortunately, class time is limited in the room. Overstaying or arriving early place students and instructors in competition for space with another class.

In some sense then, classrooms are as barren and temporary as AOL chat rooms. Not only does no one own or live in these rooms, but the students must leave their home and work to arrive at them. This isn’t just an inconvenience; it is a psychological shift of identity: at school I am the teacher; here I am the student, writ large. Consider too the implicit meaning of place when teachers must leave their school to come to the university for knowledge and resources about teaching.

It should be no wonder then, that classroom discourse is dominated by what has been labeled the I-R-E or I-R-F sequence: teacher initiation, student response, and teacher evaluation or follow-up (Mehan, 1979; Wells, 1999). Certainly the setting is organized to support this sort of teacher control over interaction. This instructional paradigm and the setting in which it occurs are vestiges of an acquisition and storage model of education.

Pepperdine’s online M.A. and Ed.D. programs are based upon a model of learning that has rarely been found in formal educational settings: the community of practice (Lave & Wenger; 1991; Wenger, 1999

The “community of practice” (CoP) is organized around some productive social practice, i.e., work, such as navigating, midwifery, adjusting insurance claims, or doctoring (Engestrom, 1993; Hutchins, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1999). Within a community there is much variation in experience and expertise. Community members share the common goal of expert practice, though they might experience more or less participation in accomplishing it, based on their expertise. Indeed, entrance to the community is based on the acknowledged desire to fully participate in the practice.

Not all communities are successful places for learning. Research on CoPs distinguishes successful from dysfunctional CoPs, largely on the basis of access that members have to knowledge in action: in people, their objects, and activities (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1999). Where there access, learning is more successful for members. They are able to increase their participation in the practice and experience their growing expertise as a transformation of their identity in the community, e.g., from newbie to journeyman. As members move through the field of practice they influence it as well as learn from it. Everyone is a co-member of multiple communities (e.g., mother, Chicana, mountain-biker, kindergarten teacher, and gardening maven), and the perceptions, metaphors, and practices from one community will always play out in the novice practices of another community as people try to make sense.

Where practice is sequestered, learning opportunities often uncouple knowledge from its use or deny the utility of knowledge spill over from other communities, and thereby make it difficult for learners to make practical sense. Formal staff development for teachers, whether formal course work or in-service workshop, looks a lot like sequestered practice. It occurs outside the actual practice of teaching, and access to experts and expert practice is severely limited by time and occasions.

The Pepperdine online program is deliberately designed to place students in the learning context of a community of practice (CoP), where the practice is the expert use of technology for learning, and practice is valued as the source of knowledge. In order to accomplish this lofty goal, the program needs first to escape the constraints of traditional university educational practice. This has become possible, even inevitable, through the use of several online tools with particular affordances4 for reframing coursework in a CoP-like context for learning.

Media Medium is the Message Messanger

I couldn’t resist a post like this. I really enjoy trying to understand media, how we use it, how we create ourselves through it, how it works…because as we examine media we also examine ourselves, and discover ourselves. It’s exciting, and kind of scary at the same time.

You may have heard of a guy who had a lot to say about this, Marshall McCluhan. His main books were “Understanding Media”, and “The Media is the Message”.

He was extremely influential back in the late sixties and on into the seventies. And of course a lot of what he said looks prophetic and prescient now. I’m pretty sure that we get the concept “Global Village” from him. And he wrote long before the internet. He thought that media were extensions of man, tools that allowed us to perform new tasks, but that as we used them we became transformed by them as well. We took on the characteristics of the media itself, thus the phrase the Media is the Message.

But a lot of people have talked about the presence or lack of presence of the whole human online. So this is in response to the general question, who’s there, what’s there, when we get a Skype call? Would all of our technology be able to reproduce the fullness of being f2f?

What I was thinking about heart…that feeling organ… is sort of a continuation of this discussion about what is real, and how do we use media, and do we include all of ourselves when we use media, such as being online?

We do now know that the brain/mind is not an isolated organ, that it’s an extension of the body in very complex ways. We say sick at heart, and in some ways depression not only feels emotionally ill, but our heart organ is likely stressed out at the same time. Does one cause the other? There’s a media involved, the traffic in hormones and other messenger molecules circulating between organs like packets on the internet. It’s the whole thing that’s important. And do we know yet what that “whole thing is”?

If it’s not just the mind/brain, and it’s not just the body, but a whole, do we have a way to talk about that? People use the word soul. Maybe that’s a good one. Does that imply some kind of spiritual connection, soul to soul? Is that restricted to three dimensions? Does soul translate into online experience? Can we “reproduce” soul, mediate it and transport it across miles of space to another “soul” in an online experience?

I have to say I’m tempted to say yes. That wherever humans are interacting, soul is there too, whether it’s cyberspace or Walmart space. I think Teilhard De Chardin was sort of getting at this idea, when he talked about the
“Noosphere”. His sort of combo of McCluhans’ global village, with a dimension of “soul”.

Not what you know, but how much dough?

(I mean, in my view, pass and fail is good enough, and after that it’s up to the student what they really are motivated to learn. “Learning” to get a grade sucks. Learning because one’s being is fully responding to possibilities is self directed learning, the kind of thing that takes place without a teacher looking over one’s shoulder, and on out of the “classroom” into real life.

But what do I know? I majored in Liberal Studies, which was essentially a way to keep people who colored outside the lines, that followed their educational bliss and tended to stray off the educational reservation and drop out, within an educational institution. This approach fit me well. I learned how to learn. And then I went out in the real world and spent my time and energy on, guess what… learning….not focused on earning. Which is what the parents were warning us against. It’s not what you know, it’s how much dough…they said. Now it seems we are being told lifelong learning is what everyone needs to do in the global economy. And I know something about that, from practicing same. Hey, I was just ahead of my time, by about 30 years…) rant rant rant rant

Communities of Practice

WebCT ate my post…What kind of manners is that?

What are Online Learning Communities
How is an online learning community related to an online community
What is the differenece between an online community and a community in the real world?
What is the difference between and online learning community and a learning community in the real world
What type of online communities and/or online learning communities do you belong to besides this class

Space and form are the two watchwords. Online space is different. The essential qualities of physical space are not the same as the “metaphorical” or “virtual” place of online space. Online education because it takes place in online space is different. But the kind of educational approach is different as well. The form if you will.

The Pepperdine model that proposes learning in a environment beyond the formal educational setting is of note here. Pepperdine model calls this Community of Practice where learning is organized around some productive social practice. But that model can apply to both online and offline learning.

Educational space can be formal, or informal. If one uses the Pepperdine model of communities of practice, an offline “learning” community can be almost as informal as a plain ole online community. The Online learning/educational experience also tends to be somewhat less formal because people are often “doing it” at home in a “free space”.

I’ve been quite attracted to the communities of practice model for learning because I think it fits well the general needs for online communities which usually aren’t restricted to a formal educational model, if any educational model is referred to at all. In fact, being enamored of the socio constructivist model, I’d recommend using CofP for even those kinds of online learning we might label academic in nature.

It all comes down to what kind of boundaries one puts around the definition of learning. And is the focus academic learning, or the stuff of everyday existence learning, such as health practices, child rearing, family dynamics and relationships, earning a livelyhood and paying one’s taxes.

In addition there’s a lot to be understood about virtual communities that develop elaborate environements for elaborate roll playing, and what kind of learning takes place in those environments, and how it takes place. Again, the Pepperdine model is a good referrence. “VR worlds as a Place for Learning”.

So at some point we need to add more qualifiers to understand what we are talking about than just “online learning community”, or “online community” and “offline learning community” and “offline community”. They are mixed together in ways that we can’t really pull all the way apart. For example, since I’m paying for this class in what I understand to be real $, but the class takes place primarily in so called no real space, then what’s the use of saying real and unreal anymore. It’s all real.

Finally what online communities do I belong too in addition to this class/cohort?

Belong to…hmmm. Occasionally I submit comments to Heath Haussamens’ political blog, at times I read and post at sports USENET groups, I communicate with colleagues, family, friends and associations through email messages and attachments, Skype, my new blog…what else? A few podcasts I subscribe to. Or did for a while until I got overwhelmed by so much to listen to. I’ve been known to vote in online polls. Back in the day a true list serve freak.

Near Time may become an extracurricular adventure. Or something similar. I belong to imagined online communities that have as yet to be manifested, such as PKE and SOL.
John

Workin the farm.

So, there’s a lot of ways to envision online community. Just as a “real world” community is a web of connections and functions and levels, so for the online community. Clearly education as an industry is going to be an important part ofonline community, as well as educational institutions figuring out ways to move their work online. There’s important overlaps there in the theory and methods of instruction, but also a huge difference in “setting”. When not in a physical school, “students” are in a different space, and educational theory will have to reflect that.

In general, there’s much to discover about synergies between creating public service online communities and real world communities. And perhaps melding both public service and business focus models for how an online community should look and “operate”. It seems that thinking of an online community in terms of the realities of “real world” community is a helpful model. Of course it isn’t quite the same, but thinking of the problems of real world community is very good place to start to examine the problems of online community. There will some very significant similarities in structure, function, and goals.

Promiscuous?

Two Q
• Is Critical Thinking learned by linear analysis, or by experience of being in a critical thinking friendly environment. I think I learned how to do critical thinking by New York Review of Books articles, and the interchange afterwards between writer and a readers. Plus particpating in online forums and list serves etc, where the critical thinking reflex was often on display!

•Do online community users become online promiscuous or fickle in their attachments to a particular online space? Do people start and then move on to something new and different, and leave a trail of cyber ghostowns? Is it hard or even possible to just find one place to BE ONLINE, and if so, then is there a problem deciding where to post, where to check posts, where to hang out? Seems like one can have Skype app open all the time but never actually be available. Where did I go? Where am I? Don’t answer that.

Where is it at?

I’m thinking that with a lot of different places to connect, such as the WebCt discussions, Skype, email, the near time space, and this space, the interaction will get somewhat spread out, and fractious. I can see that could become a problem, of where to “mostly” be. If we become too disperse, who will know who said what and where did they post it?

I think that’s a real problem with online sites. We are so many places, that what’s “present’ in one place is too little to connect to. Like phone tag, we never quite catch up. Hmmm, I think I’ll copy this post, and put it in my blog, and into a WebCt discussion post, and where else should it go? ~John

When is too much too much?

Online life has fewer boundaries than offline life when it comes to time and space. We need to learn a new set of life skills to accomodate the fact that online doesn’t follow daily schedules, and the number of possilble connections is basically unlilmited. If online community actually offers the possibility of connection with far more individuals than we would ever be able to connect with in offline life, how many connections is enough? What is the limit?

Seems like the limit is the number of hours in the day, and the amount of time we can put into online activities and still survive offline. And we may very well be tempted to push past the requirements of taking good care of ourselves and family, and work, and other requirements somewhat similar to the way a drug addict gives up “natural constraints” to just keep that high coming.

There will be a ton of books on how to manage online time soon, if they aren’t out there already, because, especially for some people, it’s a very tempting to be online as much and more than humanly possible. Color me in that danger group.

Two kinds of knowledge, two kinds of teaching

What may not be so obvious is that there are two different ways knowledge in individuals might be organized. Or so it seems to me after thinking about the previous questions of “answers” and “truth vs Truth”.

An academic model, that has a “universal” structure, categories, and fields, and methodolgy that is rational at it’s heart. Then there’s an individuals knowledge which is holistic, with each part depending on the other for an accumulated truth or knowing. When one is “teaching” one would likely need to know which kind of knowledge one is teaching from or to. This is a very interesting question for OTL because OTL likely will be as much based in working with an individual’s holistic knowledge base, as just working within the academic model. As “teaching and learning” expands beyond the academic institutions into something every institution does, and every business does, etc. OTL will encounter dealing with the whole person and will need to be good at that. And the way non academic people use and organize their knowledge.

It may well be that learning philosophies and methods, will be quite different depending on the “space” or “place” where OTL occurs.

By the way, I haven’t been in the academic “universe” for many many years, and never studied educational philosophy either. But my intuition is that I still have knowledge of what is being talked about. I may lack common terminology, and structure of fields of thought, but on the other hand I have access to a unified contiguous undivided knowledge where everything affects everything else, and truth or Truth arises out of the whole perhaps more than the parts.

A Discussion about answers.

OTL teach,
Now that we have a given definition of what is being referred to as “Truth” and “truth” in this context, thanks to your post, uh, it’s still a fascinating question. And axiology might be a different part of philosophy, but at some point, it’s all connected..=^)

The problem has been stated: “Are we fulfilling a student’s expectations for ‘answers’ or are we not? It has been posited that some students are comfortable thinking their ‘answer’ is in dynamic relation to the world (truth) [ie each changes the other] and that other students wish to believe their answer is not in a dynamic relation to the world (Truth).”

That’s a good question.
For an easy to say answer, I might suggest that a teacher should try to deal with both expectations.

And I’m back again to my earlier thought that belief is involved. Because, where do such expectations come from? Belief systems, no? And that depending on one’s belief, then the question can be answered different ways. I might actually try to explain this to the students. But I would not take the same approach to different knowledge systems.

Science is by definition about Truth. There is not a science for me, and a science for you, and there is a right answer independent of the person. Theoretically. Except perhaps if one’s belief system subjects science to a “greater truth”, a prior revelation, or fundamental doubts about its claims to know Truth.”

Mathematics, one answer fits all, I think. At least I’m not familiar with any group professing doubts that one plus one equals two for everyone.

What about religion? Some of us might teach that. Clearly the dominant model in religious thought about Truth vs truth…is our group has the Truth, your group doesn’t. And within religious groups the dominant model is that Truth is a fixed known, provided by the leaders or in the book thing. Some religions do give room for personal truth. So if teaching religion it would seem to me a teacher would have to be able to explain both approaches.

And so forth for the humanites as well?

History is an interesting one because of course for the most part dates, and persons involved are considered Truth. Doubts exist, but are expected to be in relation to “Truth”.
But we also know history is a subjective record in many respects. So it has correct answers that are correct in relation to Truth, and correct answers that are correct in relation to truth.

Am I off track here again, according to the Truth? Off the point? If so, clarification please. I want to know if my answer is right. =^)

Maybe I should go study Jim Carlton’s submitted document with all its charts containing various schools of thought, and ways of being a teacher? Perhaps my thinking would fall within the printed lines better, which might work in this discussion better? Or simply be more “accurate” “useful” “informed” “valuable”? Would that be what a teacher with a Truth approach would suggest?

For my part, I still like the idea that there’s no answer to this “question” without referrence to something a priori. Just sitting there by itself, this question circles back and eats its own tail. Which as dogs often demonstrate, can be a lot of fun.

Learning to live, or living to learn?

From a post to OTL discussions on learning online learning.

What not to do, and a bunch of other dangerous ideas you shouldn’t pay any attention to.

I’m doing this lesson backwards. I’m starting with assuming I’ve already learned how to be an online learner. I’ve already worked out through experience what works for me. Perhaps completely unconsciously, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good way for me to learn online.

Just because I might not know how I’m learning doesn’t mean I’m not learning.

So, before I “learn how to learn” and possibly lose track of my intuitive learning ways, I thought to try to describe them first. It comes down to, I just trust myself to be interested in the things I should be interested in. If I’m curious, I follow through. What better time for that kind of self directed learning than the days of google and billions of web sites served? Also, after life long attempts to “better structure my day”, I’m a bit jaded to advice to “set aside a time everyday to do….”. Not to say, I’m not tempted to think my life can be fixed up all nice and efficient, with no messy time conflicts and stupid late nights that get way out of hand.

Do I have the critical thinking capabilities present in the guidelines? I don’t know, I haven’t read them yet, but I do think I can focus on what’s important in someone else’s post, and relate to their ideas both on a rational level, and an empathic level. I think both are important. Also I’m tempted to think the whole online interchange is so fluid and fast that if one starts trying to filter everything through an extensive lists of guidelines, then one loses the focus on the immediacy of the medium. With Skype for example, stop to do much more than type as fast as you can and the conversation evaporates.

So, I tend to think we each already know how to learn, and how to interact effectively in conversation to “get what we want out of it”. I shy away from education being something that happens in a special space removed from life, or the rest of life, and something that happens according to guidelines and rules, when life itself does not. After all, what are we trying to learn? How to live, or how to “educate ourselves”? Wait, don’t answer that!

Family Unplugged

From the back of a cereal box on my dining room table. Albertson’s shredded wheat to be precise.
“FAMILY UNPLUGGED: Imagine all the things you could do instead of watching television! (go online?) Unplug the tube and grab your family!

You could: Volunteer your time at a soup kitchen.
Work on a jigsaw puzzle
Try a new recipe
Go for a walk together
Play Catch
Arrage photos into a family scrapbook
Plan a day trip
Research your family tree
Play board games
OR
Clean out your closets and hold a family yard sale
Ride bikes
Fly kites
Plant some flowers
Go for a drive
Play cards
Go on a picnic
Play charades
Catch fireflys
Go bowling
Roller Blade
Ice Skate”

Thought this was suitably ironic comment on Multitasking always online. Kind of camp, if anyone remembers that word. So just how amusing is it? Or just how sad is it that it’s amusing? The golden age was never so golden, but what did it have we don’t want to lose?

Is this something we will do for one week a year, take a “vacation” from our computer worlds? I’m not really a luddite: I’ve already made personal choices to center a good deal of my life around “online space”. Just curious though where this is going…and where am I going along with it? Where are you going reader?

Multi-tasking pros, cons, generation gaps, what’s next?

From a post in the OTL course WebCT discussion area. Now, I’m feeling like I need to move stuff I’ve written there that might be apropos for a larger audience over here. And for myself too, so that it’s in one “record” or “place” that I control. Lot of work though to go promulgating the same ideas in different spaces. Copying etc. There must be a better way. I guess that’s what links are for, but links aren’t what comes to a blog for…

Crystal is I think early twenties, no older. The topic was Multitasking pros and cons.
>…Ha ha ha. Oh man.
>
>Sorry, this amuses me more than it probably should.

Crystal,
I can imagine that’s so, and you are good to admit it. Laughing of course is good too.

Here’s why it’s more amusing than it probably should be: the difference here is that some of us have a previous reality to compare multitasking to.

So that makes this question more interesting, and more profound, because we not only have the vision of what’s cool about the now, but also what might NOT be cool about the now.

The generation born into a techology doesn’t have that capacity to compare and contrast, but of course they have the benefit of fully grokking that which they “grew up” with.

BTW, what goes around comes around. Technological change doesn’t stop. What is second nature today will be replaced by something new that unless one was born into it, will have a least some aspect of stranger in a strange land to it. Has this happened to you yet?

As Jim mentions, multitasking has been around in certain workspaces for a long time. Also in the private world, those taking care of young children are expert multitaskers. It’s just new in the extra number of things being done at the same time.

Someone at F2F, not sure who now, was saying she thought the muliti-tasking divide was those who were not brought up watcing Sesame street, with its somewhat fast pace, and those who were. Other people might point to the fast cuts of MTV, toddlers growing up watching that. And of course, if one carried a beeper around in elementary school, an MP3player, cell phone text messages etc then that’s something new too.

Julia seems like maybe she might have been a Sesame street and MTV person growing up. ? She says she multitasks to a high degree, but I think she also said that she starts to lose her comfort zone at a certain level of tasks going on at the same time. I thought she said 2, but I’m not sure what 2 means, which tasks is she including? Is she counting feeding the dog and cat?

So, just for fun, is there ever a number of tasks going on at the same time that begins to take you out of your “comfort zone”??

At play in the fields of the lord

Bonus post.
Clearly there’s something about the sense of play that is inherent in online interactions. The thing about identities, icons, pictures, the names we play. Converational styles. Perhaps its an elaboration of the ironic sense we have developed from understanding the mediums through which we live our lives. We become conscious of the games we play in a world full of media extensions of the self.

The more we understand ourselves to be somehow located in another space than our pre electronic selves, the more ironic our sense of being becomes. I have an almost inescapable impulse to be “snarky” in online discourse, because I’m very conscious of the particular limits of the online space. I guess I want to “save the other parts of my humanity” by ironically implying their existence through the way I “treat” the means of discourse. In other words there’s an unstated but real recognition that there’s more humanity present in the online interaction than might be obvious, so I want to somehow state that presence. The only way seems to be to add some “English” to the discourse which says outloud that there’s more going on than meets the eye on the monitor. Plus somehow it’s just fun to add a dramatic dimension. Become a character with some character, some spin. Spinning our lives we go, creating webs of know.

If one thinks of someone who never lost “the sense of play as a way of life component” (or recovered it through various methods?), and gives them the tools of the online world, along with a drive to do something useful with them, voila a Julz appears. What a good combo. Because as I was saying above the online world of personas is very much about living playfully, along with an ability to “act out”, ie project one’s self (selves) into a new medium(s).

I should be checking out second life. Does one ever have trouble reconciling the different personas you have created all over the web? Do they overlap in good ways? Not so good ways? Do you believe in any form of privacy, or is it just too hard to do that anymore? Personally, I think privacy is moving towards obsolete, or at minimum a big transformation of what the word means, what the experience is. One of those constitutional issues isn’t it? The Supremes finding ways to find a “Right to privacy” in the constitution, and then elaborating on how that can mean so much that we find new rights such as in regards to reproductive rights.

On the other hand, if our real selves are spread out over so many online paritally or wholy public personas, will anyone ever really know us? Wiil we wax nostalgic for the days when “privacy was possible”? My own opinion, is that if someone actually wants to read or know what I’m doing online, well, maybe that’s okay. In reality how many will want to pay attention to my personal life? So, let them know if they want to know. Except then we aren’t safe from the government, from evildoers in all stripes, and from hurting those we know with revelations of our “private thoughts”. So maybe privacy isn’t going to be possible anymore. Just an anachronism. Is this cool?

Day Nine: If everybody’s talking, is anyone listening?

Jan.29

Yesterday’s second half of the F2F had some more discussion about mulittasking. Pros and cons. And also learning styles, which comes down to another way of saying different strokes for different folks. Socio constructivist on one end of the spectrum, and cognitive constructionist, on the other.

Of number one interest when starting OTL course, because a lot of the issues of public online space involve designing attractive places for both informal and formal discourse, and maybe innovative ways of mixing the two. I think education is going to be competing with entertainment more and more for eyeballs and participation, so we may have to get good at Socio/Cognitive interplay. Cognitive play, and social thinking?

Also fascinated by what is good about mulit-tasking, and what not so good. Clearly it’s where we are going as a culture and a society, if not there already.
Our machines must be tended. They ring, buzz, vibrate, and sing to get our attention. It’s so sad to turn them off. =^)

Good: perhaps we are fully engaged? More of our capabilities activated rather than the passive TV world? More fully alive? A way to a more profound community based on many many more “interactions per minute” across time and space? Have friends in Norway? Have a online relationship with people one would never relate with in real life? Forgive me, but a new super complex web of inter-relation, kind of like the brains neural connections? A whole lot of discrete transactions that in their multiplicity and complexity create a new thing, a new consciousness, a new way of being a person, of being social, of thinking? A brave new world? You are borg?

Bad: Fragmented attention is not as profound as focused attention, is it? Would you rather talk to somebody when they are half paying attention to you, or fully paying attention? Or is that simply an obsolete question, because no one is ever going to be able to give that kind of attention in the future? How far are we from that now?

Ugly: Could we eventually not remember what it is like to fully connect one to one as persons? Will the idea of persons itself become transformed into multiple selves? Imago relationship theory already talks about our multiple selves.

One also wonders if multitasking is a natural fit for a particular age group? It might be a fit for those evolving at a rapid rate, such as adolescents, because it puts the emphasis on being open to change through not having a solid cohered self, but rather on continuously assuming parts and poses in a undefined world of roles and parts? What happens when this group becomes adults? Present adults once again on the other side of a generation gap that’s profound? Or are all generations making their own adaptations to and uses for the new technology? Don’t seniors have some interest in being transcendent and finding new roles to inhabit as aging effects change previous roles? Is there a group who would have a greater interest in the transformation of the flesh into the electric body?

Is it the adolescents and young adults, plus the seniors, that have the “disposable” time to be online, and the working world parents who are too busy with mudane to inhabit the new electric space?

Day Eight

Jan.27
Today was our F2F meeting with a large number of the cohort. First thing I was struck by was how many things were going on at the same time. Audio headsets, live text chat windows, and “guided” web surfing and Centra working. I had to wonder if this level of mulitasking was something some people were comfortable with all the time. Several in the cohort said this was the way an online class was. Frantic.

A couple other interesting questions…that I sort of fell into. If there are rubrics for a OTL course, does it change to respond to the changing realities of the online world. No rubrics don’t change much now was the answer. Do some courses use templates for teachers rather than have teachers design their own courses? Yes, some universities use them. Does it appear that in the future online teaching roles will be specialized. For example rather than having an OTL teacher responsible for troubleshooting for students, have a troubleshooting department?

Answer maybe more specialization will be coming. That’s what I would think.

Day Seven

Jan.26
Online communities. So far Cel460 has more life in the exchanges than I might have expected.
It’s odd to have a number of converstations running around in one’s head after logging out. The odd discontinuous sense of time seems nonetheless to grab hold of consciousness and not let go. It’s like the conversations never stop. Or one has a sort of duty by simply being in the group to keep giving the big wheel a kick or spin, to keep a certain base line momentum going. So, I’m getting more out of it, or realizing there’s a lot to get out of it, while at the same time realizing that’s it’s draining to have one’s batteries always connected, even when one isn’t actually here in front of the computer.

Other topic. If it’s generally a problematic situation to attempt to talk about religion, politics, or money, with ANYONE, is the same true online? Is there any more slack given to counter opinions just because they are said by a group member online? Do we care less online if someone disagrees, because mostly what we care about is just the connection? I did a little experimentation re religion and politics so far on Cel460 discussion group. I actually sort of stated my political views, though I framed them as being innocuously right down the middle. So far we haven’t had people referring to god, I don’t think, or maybe just a little. Is that because of the group is not into “god talk” or is it because people are being cautious at the beginning here. Or permanently cautious to talk about potentially hot subjects online.

That’s a subject that anyone who designs public online spaces has to at least think about some. How are hot button issues going to be handled. What kind of discipline or oversight is going to be exercised, exorcised by site manager(s). An awesomely difficult issue for something like SeniorsOnlineLasCruces.

Day Six

Jan.24
Textbooks arrive re OTL. I glance through them. A little. Read here and there. Do these guys know what they are talking about? Are online communites at all like art?

Because art is not really an academic exercise, is it? It’s something that precedes the academic description, rather than proceeding from it. And to the extent online communities are alive, to that extent one is somewhat unlikely to experience that life in an academic description. So, I’m wary of textbook prescriptions. On the other hand, why be closed to what people have worked hard to learn and share, even if in an academic context?

As long as I don’t have to consider anyone really an “expert”, and can take or leave what they have to say, got to listen and do the work to understand what is being said. And if I am going to help foster communities, help design communities, help create communities that bring to life the potential of online means “for a better tomorrow” then I have a lot to learn. Only so much can be learned by doing.

Brings up again the problem of intention. Designing, creating, implementing one has an intention, generally a purpose. Creating better tomorrows though is hubris isn’t it? If anyone is creating better tomorrows wouldn’t it be through the auspices of a higher power? Do we really have the wisdom necessary to improve on the present?

Not sure about the correct answer to that question. Nonetheless, I know nothing better than believing we do have purpose and we do have to act as if we can make a difference. In the realm of intentionally creating communithy online that’s an intimidating prospect.

Maybe the idea of someone being “in control” is the problem. Can one person create a community? Maybe. I revere the person who started New College at the University of Hawaii in late 60’s. Unclear to the extent he started things “on his own”. He certainly didn’t achieve a new institution as a one person project.

Any community would be “controlled” by the participants themselves because they would give it life, which is not “under control”. What then happens to the intentionality of “Creating Online Communities”?

Where is the balance point between individual intention and purpose on one hand, and out of control group life on the other?

Day Five

Jan.23
I decided to simply allow the title of the posts to float a little freely from the actual number of days I’ve been doing this. Add a little metaphoricality.
A quote from a book called “A Whole New Mind” by Daniel H. Pink. He’s quoting another person here Marcel Wanders “professional amateur.
“I am best at what I can’t do. It has become my ability to feel strong and confident in these situations. I feel free to move, to listen to my heart, to learn, to act even if that means I will make mistakes. If you want a creative life, do what you can’t and experience the beauty of the mistakes you make.”

That resonates for me today, after realizing yesterday how little I know about online communities and how big the challenge is even if one knows. It’s going to continue to be about feeling strong and confident in the face of the unknown, being present and willing to adjust and learn and act on the fly, and to make creative and interesting mistakes.

Day Four

Jan.22 late
Just finally got through to me what is implied by the term online community.
It’s not just people doing things within the lines, but it’s people doing all the things people do.
And looking at it that way, seems ridiculous to think people can be “controlled”.
Isn’t it more a matter of just trying to shape the environment a bit here and there?
Sending people down chutes and up ladders online seems kind of like orwellian control. A brave new world where
the choices are pre supplied. Is that community? But if one is trying to achieve a goal by creating online communities, it seems like some sort of manipulation is inevitable. Is this something new, or just more of the same social “achievements” by other methods?

Jan. 23 morning
On the other hand…as promised I see more than one side here…it’s not like we are going to stop doing things we think are important to do just because they involve scary steps into the unknown that bring up new kinds of problems, and questions of appropriateness, or even morality. In that sense I’m not conservative. I’m willing to be part of the fullness of the present as it departs for the future, and get on board the train with good faith. But the idea of online communities is no small idea, it implies a great deal of responsibility.

And that frightens me. I’m not as comfortable or as experienced in the teacher role as probably most of the OTL cohort. I haven’t perhaps come to terms with the way teachers take on responsibility for their class in ways that go beyond just imparting knowledge, and stimulating learning. Or that to do those things, a teacher must engage the whole person, and that requires a level of leadership and wisdom I wasn’t necessarily thinking about when taking on the OTL challenge.

If a classroom becomes a community, such as an online community, even a small sized one such as OTL, then clearly there’s the whole person engagement problem, but also the ways that the persons engage each other problem. I’m not saying it’s playing god, managing online communities, enabling online communities, but it seems close enough to be very sobering.

Day Three

Jan.22
Happy to receive some feedback to some of my webCT posts. Even though I was kind of tip toe-ing along the edge of propriety, there was at least one or two that appreciated that kind of communication. What seems to be coming up just in a few days of doing this, is that there’s meta levels here. We are students, learning to be teachers online, and doing that online, and in a way teaching ourselves, and each other all at the same time. I find this fascinating, and rich with possibilities for understanding communication in general, and learning useful tools for specific situations, and hopefully gaining a foundation level competence for forming online communities in the future. Perhaps the near future, as I have to get my grant application for SOL in today.

Day Two

Jan.21
Struck by the social complexity of an online community. It’s kind of like throwing a party, one has to account for the melding of a group of people who may very well have different personalities and communication styles. To say nothing of culturual differences, gender and age differences, political and religious differences. In a sense it’s the best of democracy in action because the medium seems to be a egalitarian one. Equal access, few barriers to participation.

But it’s also so open ended and undefined, that the question of “the rules of the game” becomes paramount. How can it be made comfortable for everyone without making it too impossibly superficial and boring that no one wants to participate. Well, one way might be to take steps to try to “keep it real”. We all do hunger for community, but we want at least the semblence of something beyond just platitudes and talk of the weather. Posturing of various kinds seems to have a place, with some relation to drama and theater…the costumes, lighting, sets, accompanying music track, have there counterparts in the online experience. There’s a heightened and foreshortened experience similar to the theater. New forms of communication and presentation that fit the new media. A certain flippancy, snarky wise guy everybody’s a comic, along with an odd feelilng of it being safe to expose one’s normally hidden side to the “public”.

I posted two different kinds of pictures of myself, sort of to test things out a bit. One a sort of glamour shot in a beautiful spot, and the other, intentially grungy ugly up 24 hours look. Does that help people feel comfortable with me, or just freak people out? It’s so easy to be phony online, but it’s also a fair amount of work to actually pay attention to what other people are saying and give them some feedback. It’s a paradox, because we don’t really know the people we are revealing intimate details of our lives to. What’s up with that?

I kind of let it all hang loose in my bio, though of course I avoided talking about plenty of things. If I’m writing it, I’m not even answering anyone’s questions, so I control more than what would be written about me in a media story. How does an online community become really a conversation, rather than a lot of people just talking AT each other? Well, it would no doubt need both some form that has developed and proved useful to encouragae such interchange, plus some sort of organic process where participants discover for themselves how to make it real, how to get out of it what they really need.

The web of course is littered with voices unheard in a vacuum of disinterest or in abundance of information sickness. Conversations where people try to connect, try to say something other than hello, here I am, are you there, and now what? But go no further. What is it that gets past this? Must be both a sense of real social connection, and a sense of something real being talked about.

Are the numbers of talkers and the numbers of listeners evenly distributed in the universe? What if the group is all talkers and no listeners? Or vice versa?
Does online allow an overthrow of personal limitations or patterns found in other social situations? Timid liberated to tell it like it is?

And a fine line between leading online, and getting too far out. Just like the fundamental problems of the avante garde, if one loses contact with the group then there’s absolutely nothing going on. That’s when the artists get burned at the stake.

All community meetings have certain dynamics in common. Male and female roles. Pecking order and ego trips. Power trips. Acting out our demons and neurosis, and simple calls for help, and just getting it off one’s chest. And what happens when someone tells a blue joke in mixed company, or transcends limits a bit too much? Who plays the social moderator? The moral arbitrator? The group policeman? The one who draws the line and initiates ostracism?

day one

Jan. 19
Excited to begin, and excited to read bios which is a good starting point.
Notice some of what we are doing seems as focused on instructors gathering and learning from students as vice versa. Or at least some of that going on. But that’s appropriate because we need to learn the perspective of teachers as we go. Or maybe that’s just normal paranoia. Also of interest that while there seems to be a lot of “intro” activities, and somewhat non-linear in presentation, there’s also a feel of trying out, and doing a bit of this and a bit of that, which is less intimidating than some other more controlled approach.
Instructor bios all interesting. But…What if it was video instead of pix and text? Maybe more than one pic of each instructor. Or what if it was actually a webpage designed by each instructor instead of static. What are the boundaries here, when the “subtext” is the whole world wide web? I noticed when this posted it says 11:30pm. Where in the world is this being served from? It’s actually seven hours earlier where I’m coming from…

Jan.20
This day started actually late last night. Dangers of late night posting in that who knows what one might say. Interesting questions about what the proper tone for interactions in an online learning course might be. Different online situations are different…or do they tend to end up the same becauase they are online? It’s not like anyone knows if I’m typing away naked, or sitting in front of the ocmpuer in a coat and tie. What are people comfortable with? Is that important, should one try to fit social expectations? Or just be one’s self? Or push the envelope some? Trying to do my part to create a social environment, but what happens when one of the guys makes a one of the guys type joke. The women are going to cringe, I think. How do I know if they are cringing?

How personal is it appropriate to get? Is it necessary to try a bit harder to expand personal zone to make up for lack of immediacy, and live faces?